Ms Lene Lovich is in her dressing room at London's Lyric Theatre where she appears nightly (for some 4 weeks) in the musical play about Mata Hari.
"I came to see a show at the same theatre at the beginning of the year in January; it was written by a friend of mine, Chris Judge Smith, and when I came to see it, I was having a lot of problems with my record company."
"I was really personally depressed, but I was excited to see music happening in an alternative way because unless you have a record out it's very difficult to perform live. It's the professional business and everybody has to be paid, people who do the lights, the band, and if you don't have the record out, it's impossible to do it."
"I was quite excited about the idea to do the music in the theatre situation. Actually, about four years ago I was talking to the same guy, Chris, how do you show somebody a story for a film if you have got an idea for it - how do you present it to somebody ? He told me that you write something called "treatment", showing me one he was commissioned to do about Mata Hari, but never realized. So it was a combination of events that led me to do something like this."
The play, authored by Lene, her faithful companion for many years, Les Chappell and old friend (from the days of art-studies, later founder-member of remarkable but ill-fated Van Der Graaf Generator) Chris Judge Smith, is factionalized account of one of this century's most intriguing persons. Mata, who had bursted upon Paris in 1905 with her unique oriental dance, on engagement in Berlin at the outbreak of First World War, returned to Paris only to be executed in the charge of espionage in 1917.
Lene, with her almost eccentric looks and fascinating way of performing, has been the only possible choice to bring to the stage life the enigma and mystery of Mata. But, the critics haven't thought so and not very good write-ups ensued.
She laughs genuine wholeheartedly: "On one hand it's true because on the night the press came, I was very ill, being sick the week before the opening and the first week of showing; I couldn't really sing well, even now my throat is not in the usual shape. They didn't get the best performance from me, I didn't have much energy to really give the part the real spark."
"And we were a little under-rehearsed because I had been telling my record company for nine months that we'd be doing the show. Of the only three weeks to rehearse, they sent me off to New York to finish the album for a week, so we really had only two weeks to get it right."
"Also, we have very strange critics, some said 'Why should a singer make a show about the dancer ?' But, why not ? Does it mean that I should only make a musical about singers ? And I do believe that they like to keep arts separate; that's not what I was hoping to achieve. I was hoping for some kind of communication even though I've always said that I wasn't an actress."
"I wanted to bring arts together, somehow, and in the show we have everything: puppets, music, little bit of dance, small amount of choreography ... I was hoping that the idea would work so that we could try and progress and do another one. Maybe we'll still be able to ..."
Any possibility that you put the songs from the stage production on the vinyl ?
"I'd like to but I don't think that I'll have any help from my record company. They've all come to see the show and I can only suggest and maybe they'll agree, it may happen. If it comes to it, we'd develop the songs a bit more, maybe give more information needed without the visual support."
"I think that the record company in here has changed in some way, maybe because of the circumstances that made them have different priorities. I don't think that my priorities have changed, but theirs have: for one, they are bigger company now, they employ more people, they have bigger overheads and they have become very successful with the singles here in Britain. And, that's where their emphasis really is; unless they can see that recording will be a hit-single, they are not interested."
"About two years ago, I started to record the new album, and couple of people came down and they weren't really happy about it because they couldn't see the hit-single. They have been waiting for me to change, they started not to like the way I look and they didn't even want to like the way I sang. What they were looking for, it was explained to me that they wanted to hear something coming from me that nobody would know that it was me. A song that could have been done by anybody, in other words. They were afraid that the public was tired of the way that I looked and the way that I sounded, and if I could do something more anonymous and more universal, I would have wider appeal."
To lose your identity and adopt a corporate image ?!
"Yes, that was the idea and it was put to me in many different ways, in many different versions by different people from the company. And all this time they've been waiting for me to change, but it doesn't work that way; they thought that if they stopped me from working I'd have to change eventually."
"In some ways you can say that what I've done now is some kind of a compromise, and if it is, it's acceptable to me. I like this record very much and they do too. It's very strange because some of the numbers are two years old, with the same backing tracks..."
"They sent me off to America to re-mix the album thinking that he (Bob Clearmountain who's worked with the Stones, Church, Roxy Music etc.) would take out all the craziness that they didn't like and he'd make it sound better. When we got there, he balanced it better for hi-fi freakos, made tracks sound more unifying because they were recorded in different studios, made them appear like one record. He hasn't changed much of the essence, it's still our album."
"I like everybody at Stiff and to have to go and look for another record company will be like running away from home," she smiles.
Les has come in during the conversation but, with his head buried in the papers, he utters not a single word.
The song that opens the new album, at the same time the new single "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" contains the leitmotif for Ennio Morricone's score for the spaghetti-western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
"That's the truth, and it's not my song; it's from the guys who used to be in a Dutch band called The Meteors, they are disbanded now. That riff was already in there when I picked it up, and I was glad that it was in there because I've always been a big fan of Ennio Morricone and I wouldn't mind people mentioning his name in connection with mine, even if they thought I'd stolen it."
Wouldn't the title of "No-Woman's-Land" have been better ?
"Yes, but it's traditional form of speech; Stiff didn't like it either ... the only thing they liked from the start was Les' picture of me for the cover. We decided to keep it in the family."
"Maybe all my problems are over now, or rather that is what I'd like to think," she adds as an after-thought. "It's become such a big problem for me that I'm happy to have an album out, at all."
"Sister Video (penned by J. O'Neill of Fingerprintz) is the most likeable offer of the nine, but Special Star and Rocky Road are more to the point, dealing with the coercion of the business."
"All my songs are autobiographical, very personal ... I wouldn't really like to say, I'd rather let the songs speak for themselves and to have more of the audience participation."
It's the most probable that this album will face the criticism of "not-a-big-change" after the two years lull.
"I haven't changed so much because you can only change by doing things. I'm the person who do things with feeling and intuition, doesn't plan it, I like things to happen naturally, I only learn by doing one thing at the time. The things that I learned from Flex were translated into this album, because there was nothing in between. It doesn't mean that the quality is any less..."
Dancey record without the commercial sea-songs of this season - it retails the definite Lene Lovich identity.
In 1979, Lene starred in the film "Cha Cha" with Herman Brood and Nina Hagen; following appearances in the Mata Hari play and recent screening of the French TV-movie "Rock". Is she going to pursue acting as a career ?
"Listen, if I didn't have so much trouble with the music industry, most probably I wouldn't be appearing in Mata Hari, nor doing the films. My first and foremost love is the music, so completely satisfying that I could be involved full time with no regrets."
September 27, 2019
Out (UK; 2006); TV Times Extra - Tune-in to Autumn (UK; 1979)
"1970s fashion was dull, dull, dull. The only thing I liked were the shoes - big chunky Frankenstein platforms. You could stomp around in those. But seriously, until punk came along, the best thing about fashion was that it was cheap. I totally embraced the punk look. It was do-it-yourself, just like the music. I loved the ripped-up look; I'm still wearing it, and it always freaks people out. It was like you'd just got run over by a bus. Pop was colorful and arty. David Bowie was always interesting, but punk probably had the biggest effect on me. It opened doors for a lot of people, including me. Anybody could be in a band. It was a great time for girls, misfits, and creative spirits."
(2006)
WARDROBES: WEIRD AND WONDERFUL
Lovely, dizzy Lene Lovich may give the appearance of being decked out in items left behind after a jumble sale - but in fact she's fascinated by clothes.
"What I'm into right now is curtains. I buy lots of lacy ones from market stalls, dye them, wrap them round me and tie something round the waist to keep them on. Curtains have endless different patterns, you know. Comfort on stage is very important; I don't want to be restricted by what I'm wearing and I find curtains make the perfect relaxing garment. I have suitcases full of them.
"I've just started this new thing: I wear footless tights on my arms. I pull them up so they look like those long gloves women used to wear. I like to create my own style entirely and not rely on a designer. The other thing I do is swap clothes with my friends."
Lene leans back in her curtains and fiddles with her long hair: "Don't get the idea that I only wear curtains; every once in a while I find a dress or jacket I like. There's not a great deal of difference between my day-to-day clothing and my stage gear. Perhaps I elaborate a bit when I'm performing, but I'm pretty consistent in my dress."
(1979)
(2006)
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Lovely, dizzy Lene Lovich may give the appearance of being decked out in items left behind after a jumble sale - but in fact she's fascinated by clothes.
"What I'm into right now is curtains. I buy lots of lacy ones from market stalls, dye them, wrap them round me and tie something round the waist to keep them on. Curtains have endless different patterns, you know. Comfort on stage is very important; I don't want to be restricted by what I'm wearing and I find curtains make the perfect relaxing garment. I have suitcases full of them.
"I've just started this new thing: I wear footless tights on my arms. I pull them up so they look like those long gloves women used to wear. I like to create my own style entirely and not rely on a designer. The other thing I do is swap clothes with my friends."
Lene leans back in her curtains and fiddles with her long hair: "Don't get the idea that I only wear curtains; every once in a while I find a dress or jacket I like. There's not a great deal of difference between my day-to-day clothing and my stage gear. Perhaps I elaborate a bit when I'm performing, but I'm pretty consistent in my dress."
(1979)
Dallas Morning News (20 May 1987)
'Weird' Lene Takes On Critters' Cause
The word that has dogged Lene Lovich for much of her career is "weird.' Over the past 10 years or so, the singer has remained an eccentric, rather shadowy cult figure. Despite her four-octave range, she has become best known for her chirpy yodeling style and her flamboyant stage presence.
Best known for her first album, Stateless and a handful of great singles including Lucky Number and Say When, Lovich has not released an album in years, largely because of contractual problems.
"I've been locked in the dungeon of Stiff Records for three years,' she said by telephone from New York. "They didn't like the musical direction I was taking.'
Even though their styles are quite disparate, Lovich has tended to be lumped with fellow avant-garde singers Lydia Lunch and Nina Hagen. Weird.
Her latest project does unite Lovich and Hagen in a cause that has become dear to both singers, the campaign for animal rights. The two have become spear carriers for a group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that is waging an increasingly vocal battle to stop the use of animals as food, in research and for fur. Lovich will stage a benefit concert Friday night at the Starck Club.
PETA has enlisted several other stars, including Howard Jones, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Morrissey of The Smiths and Alain Jourgensen of Ministry in the war against scientists, furriers and human carnivores. Lovich and Hagen recently released a single, Don't Kill the Animals, that has become a dance club hit. The two also have hit the road on a concert tour on behalf of PETA.
A Detroit native who has lived in Britain for the past 20 years, Lovich is a relatively recent convert, having joined the cause a year ago.
"I have been a vegetarian since May 1, 1986,' she said. "I started about five years ago saying I wouldn't eat any more babies. No more chicks. All God's creatures have a right to a life.'
But she didn't quite follow up on that sentiment. Then one day her friend Nina Hagen showed up at Lovich's house in Norfolk.
"She came up to my house to make a demo for another song,' Lovich recalled. "She told me about this (PETA) thing and she had already written half a song, and I wanted to help her finish. These ideas had been going through my head, and I decided to go ahead and do it. We just put a piece of paper on the table and started writing.'
The result was Don't Kill the Animals.
"It's the fastest song I've ever written in my whole life,' Lovich said. "Usually my songs are left available for the audience to tune in to whatever plane they wished. But this time I wanted to be sort of a newscaster and set the discussion.'
The collaboration with the German singer led to an education course for Lovich.
"At that time I wasn't really aware of the total picture,' she said. "I received a whole lot of information from PETA, and the next day I became a vegetarian. I was not just doing it because of animals but because of people. I wanted to make an effort to get rid of world hunger. It's a very simplistic argument, but I do believe that if we left the animals to their own world and concentrated on our own we could rid the world of starvation.
"Animals don't even get the diseases for which they are used in experiments, so how can their systems react? Seventy percent of the testing done on animals is non-medical. It's for everyday products like shampoo, makeup, oven cleaners. It's a multi-million-dollar industry. We have this image of researchers as angels in white coats trying to save the world, and that's not really a total picture.'
PETA, Lovich said, is not just trying to turn out pious vegetarians.
"This organization is talking about closing down some of these places, laboratories -- legally. These things (experiments) are all going on behind closed doors. If they're so wonderful, why aren't they taking people around on guided tours?'
Lovich said she believes people will be receptive to the PETA message because it makes sense.
"I'm not here to judge people. I'm here to inform people,' she said. "I think it has to be a spiritual decision, a social decision. It has to come from within. Science is wonderful. You know, I wear canvas shoes, and I also wear, you know, pretend leather.
"What we (PETA) say is, just get into vegetables. You'll find that your sensitivity, your taste, just develops -- because it's been deadened all this time. And you can save so much money.
"I say get into those vegetables, those grains. I'm really into fakes. Fake burgers, fake sweet and sour. And for those who really like the activity of eating meat, there are some just wonderful mushrooms that give you the same ripping-into-flesh sensation.'
The word that has dogged Lene Lovich for much of her career is "weird.' Over the past 10 years or so, the singer has remained an eccentric, rather shadowy cult figure. Despite her four-octave range, she has become best known for her chirpy yodeling style and her flamboyant stage presence.
Best known for her first album, Stateless and a handful of great singles including Lucky Number and Say When, Lovich has not released an album in years, largely because of contractual problems.
"I've been locked in the dungeon of Stiff Records for three years,' she said by telephone from New York. "They didn't like the musical direction I was taking.'
Even though their styles are quite disparate, Lovich has tended to be lumped with fellow avant-garde singers Lydia Lunch and Nina Hagen. Weird.
Her latest project does unite Lovich and Hagen in a cause that has become dear to both singers, the campaign for animal rights. The two have become spear carriers for a group called People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals that is waging an increasingly vocal battle to stop the use of animals as food, in research and for fur. Lovich will stage a benefit concert Friday night at the Starck Club.
PETA has enlisted several other stars, including Howard Jones, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Morrissey of The Smiths and Alain Jourgensen of Ministry in the war against scientists, furriers and human carnivores. Lovich and Hagen recently released a single, Don't Kill the Animals, that has become a dance club hit. The two also have hit the road on a concert tour on behalf of PETA.
A Detroit native who has lived in Britain for the past 20 years, Lovich is a relatively recent convert, having joined the cause a year ago.
"I have been a vegetarian since May 1, 1986,' she said. "I started about five years ago saying I wouldn't eat any more babies. No more chicks. All God's creatures have a right to a life.'
But she didn't quite follow up on that sentiment. Then one day her friend Nina Hagen showed up at Lovich's house in Norfolk.
"She came up to my house to make a demo for another song,' Lovich recalled. "She told me about this (PETA) thing and she had already written half a song, and I wanted to help her finish. These ideas had been going through my head, and I decided to go ahead and do it. We just put a piece of paper on the table and started writing.'
The result was Don't Kill the Animals.
"It's the fastest song I've ever written in my whole life,' Lovich said. "Usually my songs are left available for the audience to tune in to whatever plane they wished. But this time I wanted to be sort of a newscaster and set the discussion.'
The collaboration with the German singer led to an education course for Lovich.
"At that time I wasn't really aware of the total picture,' she said. "I received a whole lot of information from PETA, and the next day I became a vegetarian. I was not just doing it because of animals but because of people. I wanted to make an effort to get rid of world hunger. It's a very simplistic argument, but I do believe that if we left the animals to their own world and concentrated on our own we could rid the world of starvation.
"Animals don't even get the diseases for which they are used in experiments, so how can their systems react? Seventy percent of the testing done on animals is non-medical. It's for everyday products like shampoo, makeup, oven cleaners. It's a multi-million-dollar industry. We have this image of researchers as angels in white coats trying to save the world, and that's not really a total picture.'
PETA, Lovich said, is not just trying to turn out pious vegetarians.
"This organization is talking about closing down some of these places, laboratories -- legally. These things (experiments) are all going on behind closed doors. If they're so wonderful, why aren't they taking people around on guided tours?'
Lovich said she believes people will be receptive to the PETA message because it makes sense.
"I'm not here to judge people. I'm here to inform people,' she said. "I think it has to be a spiritual decision, a social decision. It has to come from within. Science is wonderful. You know, I wear canvas shoes, and I also wear, you know, pretend leather.
"What we (PETA) say is, just get into vegetables. You'll find that your sensitivity, your taste, just develops -- because it's been deadened all this time. And you can save so much money.
"I say get into those vegetables, those grains. I'm really into fakes. Fake burgers, fake sweet and sour. And for those who really like the activity of eating meat, there are some just wonderful mushrooms that give you the same ripping-into-flesh sensation.'
http://www.waxtrax-not-subpop.org/interviews/Lene_Lovich_Dallas_Morning_News_5-20-87.html
KTRU radio interview (1983)
KTRU (college radio station from Houston/Texas) - program: Rice Radio
-Hi, here is Michael Zakes, and we have Lene Lovich here, and we're going to talk with her about her and her music. First of all, could you tell us about your new album?
LL: Well, this is our third record now. Well, our third LP. We have had a little short LP out in between times, but basically this is our third major recording adventure, and it's called "No Man's Land". There is no real continuity in any of the songs, in form of a conceptual idea about the album. All of the songs are meant to be individual. And as always, we draw from any source that we like as far as musical influences go.
-On the album, there seems to be a little bit more of a dance feel to it than, say, on the first two albums. It harkens back more to, say, the "New Toy" 12". Could you say where you're getting your influences from?
LL: Well, it's really not surprising that it's in some way connected to the "New Toy" six-track that we did, because it was all more or less recorded at the same time. It's just that the record company took a long time to decide in putting this record out. And I really don't see that it's any more biased towards a dance type of rhythm, because you can take some of the most earliest songs that we did, I suppose "Lucky Number" is one of the most well-known, and I think if you put it side by side with some of the songs here, I don't think you would see a very great diversion as far as rhythmic content goes. And there are also many different types of rhythms on this record. For example, a song called "Walking Low" is not your conventional dance song, I wouldn't have said.
-Where would you say you get most of your ideas for your songs from and can you give one specific instance of when you saw something or did something and said "Hey, I'm gonna write a song about that" ?
LL: I think most of the inspirations are really coming from my songwriting partner, Les Chappell. I mean, obviously things stimulate you from time to time, but very often it's something that he's done or said or played that has started off my brain working into a direction of writing a song.
-Do you say that your new album is just being released at the end what was actually first written and recorded, say, back in 1981, 1980, around there? What have you been doing in the time since then?
LL: Well, with having to wait so long for the record company to get the idea to put the record out, I had to try to find a few alternative directions. One thing I did was to go to France to make a film for TV, which was a great experience for me, and it was really like a holiday. But it was more difficult than I thought it was gonna be, because I don't really speak French that well. Fortunately, I was playing the part of an American singer who spoke French very badly, so it was very convenient for me. But what was interesting was that I was able to play two roles - one the real character, and the other an evil imposter of that character, and I enjoyed very much playing the two personalities. Apart from that, I also was involved in a theatre show in London around the life of a real person called Mata Hari, who was executed during the First World War by the French as being a spy, a so-called spy, for Germany. And I did a lot of research, and co-wrote that with my partner Les Chappell and with another friend of ours, Chris Judge Smith. The three of us did a lot of research. Very, very difficult to find anything like the truth, and I don't think anybody ever will.
-In the time since, say have you been working in any video projects, or do you have a new album in the works?
LL: I have made a few videos. I'm sort of in the process of trying to put one together now for a song called "Blue Hotel", but that's not really finished yet. I have got ideas for songs, but we're in the middle now of a big live performance section of our lives, and I won't really have any time to do anything about these songs until I get back to England, which won't be into the summer.
-How long have you been doing this as far as not so much recording albums? Pretty much everybody knows that you were in the first wave of the Stiff acts back in 1978. What did you do before that?
LL: Well, it took me quite a long time really, before I had any sort of confidence in myself to do anything with music, although I wanted to be involved in it. So before I had the chance, really, before Stiff Records gave me the chance to record my own songs, I was learning, and I spent about five years doing this, doing various types of jobs in all aspects of playing music. I played in hotel bands, where we had to play for five hours a night doing all sort of things, tangos and waltzes and rock 'n' roll, and all sorts of things. That was mainly in Europe. I worked as a dancer for awhile when I very first started out. And I worked in cabaret with an all-girl trio, and that was also in Europe. I worked in some theatre projects, but I was never the main feature at all, I was always just learning, really. Just in the background, really, yes.
-Where do you get the ideas or influences for your clothing styles?
LL: Oh, I... Well, I've always enjoyed wearing things on my head. It used to be very, very practical when I was at art school. I was majoring in sculpture and I used to work a lot in cement plaster, and there it was really essential to wear something on your head, but... and after wearing something on your head every day, you have to sort of think of elaborating it in some way, and I actually enjoyed this and I suppose it became some sort of a habit. But I also like tieing things up, really. I like things that will re-arrange themselves during the course of the day, and I suppose I like also wearing a few different layers, because I like to be at the right temperature, if possible. So if you wear a lot of things, you can always take it off. I like really customising clothes rather than, you know, (destroying) something, designing, and then trying to make it up. That's not really my style. I like to see the potential in something. And I also like going to the sales, like on the last day. You know, when those... like everything that's there is what nobody else wants, 'cause then you've probably got something fairly unique.
-Ok. I might thank you for talking to us today and hope that the rest of the tour goes well.
LL: Ok.
LL: Well, this is our third record now. Well, our third LP. We have had a little short LP out in between times, but basically this is our third major recording adventure, and it's called "No Man's Land". There is no real continuity in any of the songs, in form of a conceptual idea about the album. All of the songs are meant to be individual. And as always, we draw from any source that we like as far as musical influences go.
-On the album, there seems to be a little bit more of a dance feel to it than, say, on the first two albums. It harkens back more to, say, the "New Toy" 12". Could you say where you're getting your influences from?
LL: Well, it's really not surprising that it's in some way connected to the "New Toy" six-track that we did, because it was all more or less recorded at the same time. It's just that the record company took a long time to decide in putting this record out. And I really don't see that it's any more biased towards a dance type of rhythm, because you can take some of the most earliest songs that we did, I suppose "Lucky Number" is one of the most well-known, and I think if you put it side by side with some of the songs here, I don't think you would see a very great diversion as far as rhythmic content goes. And there are also many different types of rhythms on this record. For example, a song called "Walking Low" is not your conventional dance song, I wouldn't have said.
-Where would you say you get most of your ideas for your songs from and can you give one specific instance of when you saw something or did something and said "Hey, I'm gonna write a song about that" ?
LL: I think most of the inspirations are really coming from my songwriting partner, Les Chappell. I mean, obviously things stimulate you from time to time, but very often it's something that he's done or said or played that has started off my brain working into a direction of writing a song.
-Do you say that your new album is just being released at the end what was actually first written and recorded, say, back in 1981, 1980, around there? What have you been doing in the time since then?
LL: Well, with having to wait so long for the record company to get the idea to put the record out, I had to try to find a few alternative directions. One thing I did was to go to France to make a film for TV, which was a great experience for me, and it was really like a holiday. But it was more difficult than I thought it was gonna be, because I don't really speak French that well. Fortunately, I was playing the part of an American singer who spoke French very badly, so it was very convenient for me. But what was interesting was that I was able to play two roles - one the real character, and the other an evil imposter of that character, and I enjoyed very much playing the two personalities. Apart from that, I also was involved in a theatre show in London around the life of a real person called Mata Hari, who was executed during the First World War by the French as being a spy, a so-called spy, for Germany. And I did a lot of research, and co-wrote that with my partner Les Chappell and with another friend of ours, Chris Judge Smith. The three of us did a lot of research. Very, very difficult to find anything like the truth, and I don't think anybody ever will.
-In the time since, say have you been working in any video projects, or do you have a new album in the works?
LL: I have made a few videos. I'm sort of in the process of trying to put one together now for a song called "Blue Hotel", but that's not really finished yet. I have got ideas for songs, but we're in the middle now of a big live performance section of our lives, and I won't really have any time to do anything about these songs until I get back to England, which won't be into the summer.
-How long have you been doing this as far as not so much recording albums? Pretty much everybody knows that you were in the first wave of the Stiff acts back in 1978. What did you do before that?
LL: Well, it took me quite a long time really, before I had any sort of confidence in myself to do anything with music, although I wanted to be involved in it. So before I had the chance, really, before Stiff Records gave me the chance to record my own songs, I was learning, and I spent about five years doing this, doing various types of jobs in all aspects of playing music. I played in hotel bands, where we had to play for five hours a night doing all sort of things, tangos and waltzes and rock 'n' roll, and all sorts of things. That was mainly in Europe. I worked as a dancer for awhile when I very first started out. And I worked in cabaret with an all-girl trio, and that was also in Europe. I worked in some theatre projects, but I was never the main feature at all, I was always just learning, really. Just in the background, really, yes.
-Where do you get the ideas or influences for your clothing styles?
LL: Oh, I... Well, I've always enjoyed wearing things on my head. It used to be very, very practical when I was at art school. I was majoring in sculpture and I used to work a lot in cement plaster, and there it was really essential to wear something on your head, but... and after wearing something on your head every day, you have to sort of think of elaborating it in some way, and I actually enjoyed this and I suppose it became some sort of a habit. But I also like tieing things up, really. I like things that will re-arrange themselves during the course of the day, and I suppose I like also wearing a few different layers, because I like to be at the right temperature, if possible. So if you wear a lot of things, you can always take it off. I like really customising clothes rather than, you know, (destroying) something, designing, and then trying to make it up. That's not really my style. I like to see the potential in something. And I also like going to the sales, like on the last day. You know, when those... like everything that's there is what nobody else wants, 'cause then you've probably got something fairly unique.
-Ok. I might thank you for talking to us today and hope that the rest of the tour goes well.
LL: Ok.
August 26, 2019
Videowave TV interview (New York; March 1990)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=41cuTS0fGHU&t=380s
-Hi, I'm Dawn Eden for Videowave, and today I'm here outside Gramercy Park in Manhattan with Lene Lovich, who is in town to promote her new album "March" on Pathfinder Records, and also she just performed last... the other night at the Palladium on the Rock Against Fur benefit, and... How did you like playing in front of that packed house last night?
LL: I think it's always exciting when you get lots of different people together. You know, people from all different walks of life, I mean in the musical way, who come together with the sole purpose of furthering animal rights. I had so much fun singing onstage with the Sugarcubes and Psychedelic Furs. We each had our own spot, and then at the end we had a big finale with the song that I wrote with Nina Hagen, called "Don't Kill the Animals". It's so much fun.
-You must have been very happy when that song became an anthem for the people in the movement.
LL: Yeah, because a lot of people, you know, don't really know what to say to people wearing fur coats, and I can always sing my little song.
-And people will take it to the heart too, because of the way in which you expressed it in the song.
LL: Well, I'm really serious about this. And I suppose "Don't Kill the Animals" was the fastest song [brief cut in the recording; the most fastly written song of hers (source: other interviews)]. It was intentionally that way, because I wanted it to be like a news broadcast.
-How did you become involved in the anti-fur movement?
LL: It was through Nina. She was approached by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to write a song for their first record, a compilation LP called "Animal Liberation". And now we're getting ready to do the next one, which is really exciting. I made a recording with a band called Erasure.
-Sure.
LL: It was a song that I wrote, but it was recorded by Vince Clarke and Andy Bell, and then Andy and I are singing it together. So that's gonna come out on a LP in September, with lots of other artists, like Howard Jones, and k.d. lang, Nathalie Merchant...
-There is a rumour, speaking of Erasure, there is a rumour that you might be opening for them on their tour. Would you care to comment on it?
LL: Ah, well, I don't think that's gonna happen this time. But I feel sure that having made this recording together, we worked so well with each other it would be really good to do something onstage with them. Actually I might be doing a stage performance with Andy Bell at some point, because we're both involved with an opera called "The Fall of the House of Usher".
-The Poe story.
LL: Yeah, but it was written by Peter Hammill. Have you heard of him?
-Sure.
LL: So I...
LL: I think that the music is really inspirational, and I would really like to perform that on stage sometime.
-Where do you think you might perform it? In the West End of London?
LL: We were about in to do the Barcelona opera festival last year. But, with one thing and another happening with these things, they don't always materialise. But, there are other people that are interested. It's possible we might do it in Amsterdam. Or, sorry, not Amsterdam, but another place in Holland.
-Your new album "March" was recorded at home, I understand. It's rather funny, because on the liner notes of the album it says "Recorded at H.O.M.E.". And I didn't even realise that it was "home" until I read it.
LL: It was really my front room. H.O.M.E. is the Headquarters of Musical Evolution.
-That's great. Is this the first time that you've recorded an album for release at home?
LL: It's the first time we've done so much work at home. And I'm so excited about it, because it did give us the time that we needed to make experiments, and it was a lot of fun to work in a relaxed atmosphere, and know that you didn't have to get out before the next band arrived and things like that.
-It must have been neat for your kids too, to actually watch mum doing a recording session.
LL: Well, if you listen really carefully, you probably can still hear in the mix some little noises [Note: from the kids].
-Seriously?
LL: You can probably hear telephones and things like that as well. But it kind of mixes together in an interesting way and I like that.
-Does being in a relationship, as you are, help give you more stability in writing songs somehow?
LL: Well, Les and I, Les Chappell, my partner, and I, we work so closely together that we are so entwined in this that it's very difficult for us to work out who did what, really, by the end of the song. So without each other the song just wouldn't ever arrive. And if we didn't work together musically, we'd never see each other.
-We're going to watch the video "Make Believe" right now, from the album "March".
["Make Believe" video playing]
-We're back on Videowave, I'm Dawn Eden. Here is Lene Lovich, we just saw the video "Make Believe" from her new album "March". What was it like filming that video?
LL: It was exciting for me, because I hadn't really done any film work that involved my own music for some time. So, it's a wonderful world, that world of film. I just love the way that you can create a different world. We didn't have a very big budget, but the director, Miki Watanabe, was really great in making the best out of a very low-budget situation. So it was just an exciting thing, I have a great affinity with the camera. Maybe I used to be a machine.
-Well, you know, when we were chatting right before this taping, you were describing how you feel about the video and how a video should represent a song.
LL: I think it's very difficult. I think it's very hard, in fact it can be very confining when you're doing videos, because it's difficult to tell more than one story. And this is a problem when your music really can be interpreted on very many different planes. So maybe that's why sometimes my videos seem a little crazy, or a little bit cryptic. They're not meant to be that to confuse people, but they're meant to just open it out, so that more interpretations can occur.
-Right now your level of fame has reached a point where in England, of course, you've had, you know, many chart hits. And in America you've got a solid core of followers, along with songs moving on to the charts. What I'm wondering is, are you satisfied with your level of fame right now? Would you like to see yourself have... I mean, is it very important for you to have, say, a number one single here in the States?
LL: Well, if you had a number one hit single, that would mean that a lot of people knew about you, and that would mean that your communication had gone that much further. So I would be very excited for that to happen.
-At the same time...
LL: That's why I'm here really, to communicate.
-I guess it must be also be important for you to have a hit here in the States, because if you have a huge hit, then more people will become familiar with your animal rights message as well.
LL: I think people really need to have information. I was sympathetic for a long time, and yet did nothing about it. So I think the more information that you have, the more confident you feel about doing something about it. So, a hit record would be really great in just getting that message across.
-A lot of people feel that now in the 90s the music business is changing and becoming more receptive to pro-... to what used to be called "protest songs". Do you find that yourself?
LL: I think we're just getting better at it. You know, a lot of times people concentrated on the negative side of things, and now we're finding more fun ways of getting a message across. I heard of a bunch of transvestites that wanted to wear fur coats and... fake fur boats with blood all over them, and a placard saying "Fur Is A Drag".
-That's great. What are your plans for the coming year?
LL: I'd really, really, dearly love to make some live shows, because I think that's the best way of communicating really. And people are sure to get the message if I'm there, telling the story.
-When you do live shows, are you planning to have a group like Friends of the Earth have a table at your shows, so that interested people can register?
LL: Oh, if they want to. If they want to, yes.
-Because a lot of artists are doing that. You know, McCartney's doing it, and the B-52s.
LL: Yeah, I was there at the B-52 show, and I thought that was working really well.
-Are you also planning to do more acting? You had mentioned the opera earlier.
LL: Yes, I've just made a short film in England with Captain Sensible from The Damned, and it's going to be a half-documentary, half-fantasy in which I play the part of a kind of demonic waitress in this weird cafe. And it's called "Meathead", and it's got lots of really interesting bands contributing to the soundtrack, because there's no dialogue in it but the message is there in the visuals and in the songs.
-Do you know if it's going to be released in the States?
LL: I really hope so, because I think it's really going to be good.
-Well, I wish all the best with your new album, new movie, new opera, and all the things you're doing, you're everywhere. Thank you very much for coming down. This is Dawn Eden from Videowave.
LL: My pleasure.
LL: I think it's always exciting when you get lots of different people together. You know, people from all different walks of life, I mean in the musical way, who come together with the sole purpose of furthering animal rights. I had so much fun singing onstage with the Sugarcubes and Psychedelic Furs. We each had our own spot, and then at the end we had a big finale with the song that I wrote with Nina Hagen, called "Don't Kill the Animals". It's so much fun.
-You must have been very happy when that song became an anthem for the people in the movement.
LL: Yeah, because a lot of people, you know, don't really know what to say to people wearing fur coats, and I can always sing my little song.
-And people will take it to the heart too, because of the way in which you expressed it in the song.
LL: Well, I'm really serious about this. And I suppose "Don't Kill the Animals" was the fastest song [brief cut in the recording; the most fastly written song of hers (source: other interviews)]. It was intentionally that way, because I wanted it to be like a news broadcast.
-How did you become involved in the anti-fur movement?
LL: It was through Nina. She was approached by People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals to write a song for their first record, a compilation LP called "Animal Liberation". And now we're getting ready to do the next one, which is really exciting. I made a recording with a band called Erasure.
-Sure.
LL: It was a song that I wrote, but it was recorded by Vince Clarke and Andy Bell, and then Andy and I are singing it together. So that's gonna come out on a LP in September, with lots of other artists, like Howard Jones, and k.d. lang, Nathalie Merchant...
-There is a rumour, speaking of Erasure, there is a rumour that you might be opening for them on their tour. Would you care to comment on it?
LL: Ah, well, I don't think that's gonna happen this time. But I feel sure that having made this recording together, we worked so well with each other it would be really good to do something onstage with them. Actually I might be doing a stage performance with Andy Bell at some point, because we're both involved with an opera called "The Fall of the House of Usher".
-The Poe story.
LL: Yeah, but it was written by Peter Hammill. Have you heard of him?
-Sure.
LL: So I...
-A cult figure for some time.
LL: I think that the music is really inspirational, and I would really like to perform that on stage sometime.
-Where do you think you might perform it? In the West End of London?
LL: We were about in to do the Barcelona opera festival last year. But, with one thing and another happening with these things, they don't always materialise. But, there are other people that are interested. It's possible we might do it in Amsterdam. Or, sorry, not Amsterdam, but another place in Holland.
-Your new album "March" was recorded at home, I understand. It's rather funny, because on the liner notes of the album it says "Recorded at H.O.M.E.". And I didn't even realise that it was "home" until I read it.
LL: It was really my front room. H.O.M.E. is the Headquarters of Musical Evolution.
-That's great. Is this the first time that you've recorded an album for release at home?
LL: It's the first time we've done so much work at home. And I'm so excited about it, because it did give us the time that we needed to make experiments, and it was a lot of fun to work in a relaxed atmosphere, and know that you didn't have to get out before the next band arrived and things like that.
-It must have been neat for your kids too, to actually watch mum doing a recording session.
LL: Well, if you listen really carefully, you probably can still hear in the mix some little noises [Note: from the kids].
-Seriously?
LL: You can probably hear telephones and things like that as well. But it kind of mixes together in an interesting way and I like that.
-Does being in a relationship, as you are, help give you more stability in writing songs somehow?
LL: Well, Les and I, Les Chappell, my partner, and I, we work so closely together that we are so entwined in this that it's very difficult for us to work out who did what, really, by the end of the song. So without each other the song just wouldn't ever arrive. And if we didn't work together musically, we'd never see each other.
-We're going to watch the video "Make Believe" right now, from the album "March".
["Make Believe" video playing]
-We're back on Videowave, I'm Dawn Eden. Here is Lene Lovich, we just saw the video "Make Believe" from her new album "March". What was it like filming that video?
LL: It was exciting for me, because I hadn't really done any film work that involved my own music for some time. So, it's a wonderful world, that world of film. I just love the way that you can create a different world. We didn't have a very big budget, but the director, Miki Watanabe, was really great in making the best out of a very low-budget situation. So it was just an exciting thing, I have a great affinity with the camera. Maybe I used to be a machine.
-Well, you know, when we were chatting right before this taping, you were describing how you feel about the video and how a video should represent a song.
LL: I think it's very difficult. I think it's very hard, in fact it can be very confining when you're doing videos, because it's difficult to tell more than one story. And this is a problem when your music really can be interpreted on very many different planes. So maybe that's why sometimes my videos seem a little crazy, or a little bit cryptic. They're not meant to be that to confuse people, but they're meant to just open it out, so that more interpretations can occur.
-Right now your level of fame has reached a point where in England, of course, you've had, you know, many chart hits. And in America you've got a solid core of followers, along with songs moving on to the charts. What I'm wondering is, are you satisfied with your level of fame right now? Would you like to see yourself have... I mean, is it very important for you to have, say, a number one single here in the States?
LL: Well, if you had a number one hit single, that would mean that a lot of people knew about you, and that would mean that your communication had gone that much further. So I would be very excited for that to happen.
-At the same time...
LL: That's why I'm here really, to communicate.
-I guess it must be also be important for you to have a hit here in the States, because if you have a huge hit, then more people will become familiar with your animal rights message as well.
LL: I think people really need to have information. I was sympathetic for a long time, and yet did nothing about it. So I think the more information that you have, the more confident you feel about doing something about it. So, a hit record would be really great in just getting that message across.
-A lot of people feel that now in the 90s the music business is changing and becoming more receptive to pro-... to what used to be called "protest songs". Do you find that yourself?
LL: I think we're just getting better at it. You know, a lot of times people concentrated on the negative side of things, and now we're finding more fun ways of getting a message across. I heard of a bunch of transvestites that wanted to wear fur coats and... fake fur boats with blood all over them, and a placard saying "Fur Is A Drag".
-That's great. What are your plans for the coming year?
LL: I'd really, really, dearly love to make some live shows, because I think that's the best way of communicating really. And people are sure to get the message if I'm there, telling the story.
-When you do live shows, are you planning to have a group like Friends of the Earth have a table at your shows, so that interested people can register?
LL: Oh, if they want to. If they want to, yes.
-Because a lot of artists are doing that. You know, McCartney's doing it, and the B-52s.
LL: Yeah, I was there at the B-52 show, and I thought that was working really well.
-Are you also planning to do more acting? You had mentioned the opera earlier.
LL: Yes, I've just made a short film in England with Captain Sensible from The Damned, and it's going to be a half-documentary, half-fantasy in which I play the part of a kind of demonic waitress in this weird cafe. And it's called "Meathead", and it's got lots of really interesting bands contributing to the soundtrack, because there's no dialogue in it but the message is there in the visuals and in the songs.
-Do you know if it's going to be released in the States?
LL: I really hope so, because I think it's really going to be good.
-Well, I wish all the best with your new album, new movie, new opera, and all the things you're doing, you're everywhere. Thank you very much for coming down. This is Dawn Eden from Videowave.
LL: My pleasure.
July 09, 2019
A.M. (about paranormal experiences) (UK; 3/1980)
[See also Gazette Telegraph interview (31 March 1980) about this subject.]
Born again Lene: again and again.
Born again Lene: again and again.
The reincarnation of Lene Lovich
Lene Lovich learned very early that it wasn't a good idea to let on that you thought you were from another planet. No martyr she, to suffer at the hands of the ignorant. Instead she chose to suppress such thoughts, however spontaneously they entered her mind, and to rationalise the visions that she could more or less turn on and off at random, as the product of a fertile imagination.
Not bad thinking for an eight-year-old. Survival is the key and Lene knew instinctively that people would not take kindly to a child who dreamt the future in panoramic full-colour. Even as an adult she's aware that reincarnation and allied topics have their pitfalls if, in conversation, you're prepared to be specific about your own experiences rather than just theorise, wide-eyed, about the possibilities.
Still, it's an important part of her life and she has managed to find her way into a world where her extra-sensory experiences need no longer be denied. She inhabits the pop world with flair and dignity and if a touch of madness has helped her to be the true original that she is - well, so far, no one is complaining.
Mind you, if Lene Lovich is mad then insanity should be handed out by the welfare state along with the child allowance and social security. Pleasant, articulate and possessed of a truly winning smile she recounts what must have been devastating experiences with no sense of wonder so that the true effect of what she is saying can really only be gained with hindsight.
The fact of her powers, some of which are at her beck and call while others can be frighteningly spontaneous, she accepts wholeheartedly. It is the questions that they raise and the theories that they produce which are not so readily welcomed.
"I change my theories about every six months," she says, smiling. She's aware that it's an area with no black and white, mostly because orthodox science has yet to give the subject its stamp of respectability, even as a topic for serious discussion.
"It's really only in the past 10 years that people have tried in any serious way to document experiences. Mostly when you talk about mysterious experiences you are regarded as fantasising, exaggerating.
"There are behavioural restrictions which society imposes and even if you step slightly outside of them - saying hello to a stranger or singing in the street, for instance - people think you are silly. I went to see a doctor once, after a particularly disturbing experience, and his sympathy gave me confidence enough to tell him about other things which had happened to me. He wrote everything down in the form of a letter, sealed it in an envelope and suggested I take the letter along to a psychiatrist that he recommended.
"When I got home my curiosity got the better of me so I steamed the envelope open and read the letter. I thought: 'If they read this they're going to put me away'. I decided not to go, my freedom's worth more to me than anything and in any case I don't have much confidence in the way that they would handle a situation like that."
The experience that precipitated the visit to her doctor was one which shook her badly. "One day I just found myself sitting on a window ledge, like a cat. I wasn't going to jump or anything but it was frightening because I don't know how I got there or what I was there for. I thought 'This is getting out of hand'."
It wasn't the first time that something like that had happened completely outside her control. During her days at Art College, towards the end of her stay, she spent more and more time outside the college. One day she visited the British Museum to make drawings, ideas for her sculpting. "I was leaving, walking down the stairs. I had a whole load of junk with me which I needed to rearrange because it was falling all over the place.
"I put my bags down on the stairs for a few seconds and when I looked down I noticed something odd, like something materialising. It was very hazy at first, and then I saw I was wearing sandals - which I hadn't been seconds before.
"But what really freaked me was that I became aware of something yellow flapping around my ankles, which disturbed me immensely because I had developed an almost passionate hatred of the colour and wouldn't have been seen dead in it. And yet there I was wearing this yellow dress, a flowing garment, like a robe.
"Then a really, really loud noise came thundering in and I looked over the staircase and there was a marketplace - people were shouting and screaming, there were animals: total confusion. I remember seeing huge sacks of grain, as big as table tops, and people carrying baskets.
"But the thing that really affected me was the feeling that I had gone to that place to meet somebody, it could have been a boyfriend or a lover. I knew that it was a secret meeting and that we had chosen this crowded place so as not to be noticed.
"And then I realised that this other person was not going to turn up. I was totally shattered. As soon as I realised it I felt this stab of dreadful disappointment and everything just started to fade away. I don't think all this can have taken very long because in a place like the British Museum I would have drawn attention to myself. I don't even know what I was doing while it went on, it was like time had stood still for a few seconds.
"Even now, when I think about it, that dreadful feeling of having been let down comes over me."
As she sits, hands on lap, recounting this extraordinary experience, there is not the remotest temptation to think of Lene Lovich as even mildly dotty. She is a calm, very pretty girl, softly Germanic to look at. Her appearance is, of course, eccentric and only an inveterate betting man would put money on whether she was fat, thin or voluptuous under the bulky clothing she tends to wear.
She speaks very precisely, often with the intonation of a little girl, her thoughts organised, her sentences cohesive. In an age where sex appeal seems to depend on saying as little as possible and wearing a similar amount of clothes, Lene Lovich doesn't just ignore the rules - she doesn't even seem aware that the game is in progress. The upshot is that she is very, very attractive.
Part of her appeal, of course, is the mystery which surrounds her. Unlike others, hers will not go away in the fullness of time because it is not the result of some PR man's imagination. It has been with her since she can remember and is even now helping to feed her creativity. Sometimes the childhood dreams and the adult reality link.
"I remember when I was eight having a really vivid dream, you know the kind when you really believe it is happening and it still seems real when you wake up. I was very excited at that age about the prospect of space and space travel and in my dream I was on a space ship and there was a party going on - balloons, crackers, streamers, all the usual party stuff.
"When I thought about it later I was really disgusted with myself. I told myself: 'Don't be an idiot, you wouldn't really have balloons and crackers in space. It's a serious business handling a space ship.'
"Then about three or four years ago we were in a studio over Christmas time and we decided to hold a surprise party for the engineer. While he was out to dinner we completely decorated the control room and then turned out all the lights and hid behind the desk so we would surprise him with 'Happy Christmas' when he walked back.
"While we were waiting I looked at the control desk with all its lights and buttons, looked around the room at all the balloons and streamers and realised that that had been my dream. I saw how the technology of a modern recording studio would seem to an eight-year-old child all those years ago just like the inside of a space ship."
It was about the age of eight that she began to articulate, to herself at least, certain strange things which were going on in her mind. "I had a few premonitions, often very tiny things, nothing significant. What you might call extraordinary mental activity."
Other things were not so easily explained. "We lived in Detroit, a very run-down area. There weren't many places to play - the river was quite a walk away and as a child you didn't want to venture too far because it wasn't very safe.
"The place to play was this field nearby where there had been some houses knocked down and it had just grown wild, a flat place to play jungle and those sort of games.
"We weren't long into one of our summer holidays when I had a dream about the field being levelled and dug up. I was crying about it when I woke up and I thought: 'This is stupid, what does it matter if they cut it down?' When I went outside all my friends were sitting on our porch looking very sad. 'They cut the field down', they told me. The lawnmowers and tractors had come in that very morning."
"Sleep dreams were one thing, but there were also the waking ones, images which could sometimes get quite frightening. "It's all right when they were nice pictures but one thing which used to happen regularly was that whenever I would put my hand on a door handle a scene would flash through my mind. It didn't matter where the door was, even to my own room. I would see the most horrible, gruesome things behind the door, almost like tuning in to a movie on the television, and the images were specifically of scenes in the room I was about to enter.
"Eventually, through practice, I learned to suppress that, although of course it could be quite entertaining. After regular school (she came to Britain at the age of thirteen) I went to art school and began to release the stops on my imagination.
"But while I was at school I knew that there were things I should not talk about." Now she is looking for words, not sure that her next admission won't get her certified. "I had the idea, I don't know, er, but I thought that, maybe, I was from another planet." A nervous laugh punctuates this confession. She knows it was an irrational concept. All it proves, though, is that children are just as capable of clutching at straws as adults in a tight situation. Grown-ups don't have an exclusive hold on foolishness.
"It didn't last terribly long, a couple of years on and off. I used to look around, because I felt sure I couldn't be the only one. I even used to look at trees or other inaminate objects for signs that I wasn't on my own."
The logic was simple. "Certain things were happening in my mind which I had tried to talk about to my friends, but all I got was strange looks. They didn't understand, so I felt I was different."
It was at art school that she began to see the potential for using these previously unwelcome mind-pictures. Fully aware that she didn't know anything about Art - as contained in galleries - she had really only entered the school to get away from home. "I was really very keen, though, to understand what this Art was." Very quickly she realised that, whatever it was, it wasn't for her.
"I didn't have problems in the beginning because I was keen to learn and was doing more or less what the teachers wanted. I had it down to a pretty neat formula, what was good and acceptable to make for happy days.
"Then I began to think: 'This is really silly. Art is a form of self-expression and the ideas should be your own.' That's when the trouble really started because I realised that the only thing I could be really honest about was my own imagination. We'd had a few lectures about William Blake and he had seemed to listen to his imagination. He may have suffered in his lifetime but at least his Art was true."
She was mostly sculpting by now and took to entering the classroom devoid of concrete ideas and with the intention of allowing her mind to take over. "I wouldn't know what I was going to make, just let my mind be completely open, almost trance-like. It was very exciting and I would work very fast."
Around this time Lene began to think about what these mental interventions represented. Fellow-students would come to look at her work and point out aspects of it which were familiar to them. She realised that she was incorporating into her sculpture images of people or places which actually existed but which were outside her own physical experience.
Hard on the heels of this revelation came the British Museum incident. "The idea of seeing something centuries old and being a part of it didn't really affect me very much. I wasn't terribly surprised although I knew that it wasn't one of my usual imagination things and it wasn't for my entertainment.
"What concerned me was that it was something totally out of my control. My imagination I could switch on and off practically at will. You know, if I'm on a tube train and I'm bored I can entertain myself by seeing monkeys swinging on the hand grips. But this thing in the British Museum had happened completely spontaneously."
Although, as she has said, she entertains different theories in a faddish way, the underlying theme of her belief in reincarnation is her reluctance to accept the finality of death. It's a powerful argument which has been used by some influential people. Benjamin Franklin firmly believed that he had lived before: "When I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of water wasted, I cannot expect the annihilation of souls, or believe that He will suffer the daily waste of millions of minds ready made that now exist and put Himself to the continual trouble of making new ones. Thus, finding myself to exist in this world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist."
Of course it's easy to read ego in that statement, a desire on Franklin's part to believe that the world couldn't go on without his illuminating presence. But, as Lene Lovich says: "It's difficult to rationalise that someone can be walking along the street, thinking, controlling a large part of their environment, then walk off the curb, get hit by a car, and that's the end of that.
"We can't be something one minute and nothing the next."
In support of such doubts Heber Curtis, an American astro-physicist, said: "With energy, matter, space and time continuous, with nothing lost or wasted, are we ourselves the only manifestation that comes to an end, ceases, is annihilated at three score years and ten?"
If it is true that we live before and will live again, why is it that we don't remember past lives. Lene Lovich believes, although it could be one of her passing theories, that between lives we may go through some form of deprogramming and that the memory is then stored in some far corner of our minds.
Scientists have already declared that we only use about 10 per cent of our brains [Note: incorrect] and that even a genius is only using about another three or four per cent, so the deprogramming idea is not so far-fetched. It also provides an easy answer to the problem of child prodigies such as Mozart: how else to explain a four-year-old writing complex symphonies except that he carried the knowledge with him from a former life?
"Some people you meet," says Lene, "even quite young children, have much deeper understanding of things than they could possibly have learned in their young lives, or even just one previous life."
There is no room in her life for organised religion; too many rules, too much restriction. But there is comfort to be had from her own beliefs, and she does accept the existence of a Deity, although she can't or won't put a name to it. "I don't fear death itself, only the possibility that it might be painful. There is a worry, of course, about the future because I don't always see it in a beautiful way.
"But I am disturbed by these people who insist on freezing themselves," she says, laughing. "I wouldn't want to come back as myself, I can't think of anything more dull.
"Whatever the world will be like in the future, I think that you need to be introduced to a society gradually, to be born into it and grow up in it so you can accept its hardships.
"Nor would I want to live forever. Much as I am enjoying this life my belief and curiosity about future lives is, I guess, greater than my interest in continuing this one indefinitely."
Born again Lene: again and again.
The reincarnation of Lene Lovich
Lene Lovich learned very early that it wasn't a good idea to let on that you thought you were from another planet. No martyr she, to suffer at the hands of the ignorant. Instead she chose to suppress such thoughts, however spontaneously they entered her mind, and to rationalise the visions that she could more or less turn on and off at random, as the product of a fertile imagination.
Not bad thinking for an eight-year-old. Survival is the key and Lene knew instinctively that people would not take kindly to a child who dreamt the future in panoramic full-colour. Even as an adult she's aware that reincarnation and allied topics have their pitfalls if, in conversation, you're prepared to be specific about your own experiences rather than just theorise, wide-eyed, about the possibilities.
Still, it's an important part of her life and she has managed to find her way into a world where her extra-sensory experiences need no longer be denied. She inhabits the pop world with flair and dignity and if a touch of madness has helped her to be the true original that she is - well, so far, no one is complaining.
Mind you, if Lene Lovich is mad then insanity should be handed out by the welfare state along with the child allowance and social security. Pleasant, articulate and possessed of a truly winning smile she recounts what must have been devastating experiences with no sense of wonder so that the true effect of what she is saying can really only be gained with hindsight.
The fact of her powers, some of which are at her beck and call while others can be frighteningly spontaneous, she accepts wholeheartedly. It is the questions that they raise and the theories that they produce which are not so readily welcomed.
"I change my theories about every six months," she says, smiling. She's aware that it's an area with no black and white, mostly because orthodox science has yet to give the subject its stamp of respectability, even as a topic for serious discussion.
"It's really only in the past 10 years that people have tried in any serious way to document experiences. Mostly when you talk about mysterious experiences you are regarded as fantasising, exaggerating.
"There are behavioural restrictions which society imposes and even if you step slightly outside of them - saying hello to a stranger or singing in the street, for instance - people think you are silly. I went to see a doctor once, after a particularly disturbing experience, and his sympathy gave me confidence enough to tell him about other things which had happened to me. He wrote everything down in the form of a letter, sealed it in an envelope and suggested I take the letter along to a psychiatrist that he recommended.
"When I got home my curiosity got the better of me so I steamed the envelope open and read the letter. I thought: 'If they read this they're going to put me away'. I decided not to go, my freedom's worth more to me than anything and in any case I don't have much confidence in the way that they would handle a situation like that."
The experience that precipitated the visit to her doctor was one which shook her badly. "One day I just found myself sitting on a window ledge, like a cat. I wasn't going to jump or anything but it was frightening because I don't know how I got there or what I was there for. I thought 'This is getting out of hand'."
It wasn't the first time that something like that had happened completely outside her control. During her days at Art College, towards the end of her stay, she spent more and more time outside the college. One day she visited the British Museum to make drawings, ideas for her sculpting. "I was leaving, walking down the stairs. I had a whole load of junk with me which I needed to rearrange because it was falling all over the place.
"I put my bags down on the stairs for a few seconds and when I looked down I noticed something odd, like something materialising. It was very hazy at first, and then I saw I was wearing sandals - which I hadn't been seconds before.
"But what really freaked me was that I became aware of something yellow flapping around my ankles, which disturbed me immensely because I had developed an almost passionate hatred of the colour and wouldn't have been seen dead in it. And yet there I was wearing this yellow dress, a flowing garment, like a robe.
"Then a really, really loud noise came thundering in and I looked over the staircase and there was a marketplace - people were shouting and screaming, there were animals: total confusion. I remember seeing huge sacks of grain, as big as table tops, and people carrying baskets.
"But the thing that really affected me was the feeling that I had gone to that place to meet somebody, it could have been a boyfriend or a lover. I knew that it was a secret meeting and that we had chosen this crowded place so as not to be noticed.
"And then I realised that this other person was not going to turn up. I was totally shattered. As soon as I realised it I felt this stab of dreadful disappointment and everything just started to fade away. I don't think all this can have taken very long because in a place like the British Museum I would have drawn attention to myself. I don't even know what I was doing while it went on, it was like time had stood still for a few seconds.
"Even now, when I think about it, that dreadful feeling of having been let down comes over me."
As she sits, hands on lap, recounting this extraordinary experience, there is not the remotest temptation to think of Lene Lovich as even mildly dotty. She is a calm, very pretty girl, softly Germanic to look at. Her appearance is, of course, eccentric and only an inveterate betting man would put money on whether she was fat, thin or voluptuous under the bulky clothing she tends to wear.
She speaks very precisely, often with the intonation of a little girl, her thoughts organised, her sentences cohesive. In an age where sex appeal seems to depend on saying as little as possible and wearing a similar amount of clothes, Lene Lovich doesn't just ignore the rules - she doesn't even seem aware that the game is in progress. The upshot is that she is very, very attractive.
Part of her appeal, of course, is the mystery which surrounds her. Unlike others, hers will not go away in the fullness of time because it is not the result of some PR man's imagination. It has been with her since she can remember and is even now helping to feed her creativity. Sometimes the childhood dreams and the adult reality link.
"I remember when I was eight having a really vivid dream, you know the kind when you really believe it is happening and it still seems real when you wake up. I was very excited at that age about the prospect of space and space travel and in my dream I was on a space ship and there was a party going on - balloons, crackers, streamers, all the usual party stuff.
"When I thought about it later I was really disgusted with myself. I told myself: 'Don't be an idiot, you wouldn't really have balloons and crackers in space. It's a serious business handling a space ship.'
"Then about three or four years ago we were in a studio over Christmas time and we decided to hold a surprise party for the engineer. While he was out to dinner we completely decorated the control room and then turned out all the lights and hid behind the desk so we would surprise him with 'Happy Christmas' when he walked back.
"While we were waiting I looked at the control desk with all its lights and buttons, looked around the room at all the balloons and streamers and realised that that had been my dream. I saw how the technology of a modern recording studio would seem to an eight-year-old child all those years ago just like the inside of a space ship."
It was about the age of eight that she began to articulate, to herself at least, certain strange things which were going on in her mind. "I had a few premonitions, often very tiny things, nothing significant. What you might call extraordinary mental activity."
Other things were not so easily explained. "We lived in Detroit, a very run-down area. There weren't many places to play - the river was quite a walk away and as a child you didn't want to venture too far because it wasn't very safe.
"The place to play was this field nearby where there had been some houses knocked down and it had just grown wild, a flat place to play jungle and those sort of games.
"We weren't long into one of our summer holidays when I had a dream about the field being levelled and dug up. I was crying about it when I woke up and I thought: 'This is stupid, what does it matter if they cut it down?' When I went outside all my friends were sitting on our porch looking very sad. 'They cut the field down', they told me. The lawnmowers and tractors had come in that very morning."
"Sleep dreams were one thing, but there were also the waking ones, images which could sometimes get quite frightening. "It's all right when they were nice pictures but one thing which used to happen regularly was that whenever I would put my hand on a door handle a scene would flash through my mind. It didn't matter where the door was, even to my own room. I would see the most horrible, gruesome things behind the door, almost like tuning in to a movie on the television, and the images were specifically of scenes in the room I was about to enter.
"Eventually, through practice, I learned to suppress that, although of course it could be quite entertaining. After regular school (she came to Britain at the age of thirteen) I went to art school and began to release the stops on my imagination.
"But while I was at school I knew that there were things I should not talk about." Now she is looking for words, not sure that her next admission won't get her certified. "I had the idea, I don't know, er, but I thought that, maybe, I was from another planet." A nervous laugh punctuates this confession. She knows it was an irrational concept. All it proves, though, is that children are just as capable of clutching at straws as adults in a tight situation. Grown-ups don't have an exclusive hold on foolishness.
"It didn't last terribly long, a couple of years on and off. I used to look around, because I felt sure I couldn't be the only one. I even used to look at trees or other inaminate objects for signs that I wasn't on my own."
The logic was simple. "Certain things were happening in my mind which I had tried to talk about to my friends, but all I got was strange looks. They didn't understand, so I felt I was different."
It was at art school that she began to see the potential for using these previously unwelcome mind-pictures. Fully aware that she didn't know anything about Art - as contained in galleries - she had really only entered the school to get away from home. "I was really very keen, though, to understand what this Art was." Very quickly she realised that, whatever it was, it wasn't for her.
"I didn't have problems in the beginning because I was keen to learn and was doing more or less what the teachers wanted. I had it down to a pretty neat formula, what was good and acceptable to make for happy days.
"Then I began to think: 'This is really silly. Art is a form of self-expression and the ideas should be your own.' That's when the trouble really started because I realised that the only thing I could be really honest about was my own imagination. We'd had a few lectures about William Blake and he had seemed to listen to his imagination. He may have suffered in his lifetime but at least his Art was true."
She was mostly sculpting by now and took to entering the classroom devoid of concrete ideas and with the intention of allowing her mind to take over. "I wouldn't know what I was going to make, just let my mind be completely open, almost trance-like. It was very exciting and I would work very fast."
Around this time Lene began to think about what these mental interventions represented. Fellow-students would come to look at her work and point out aspects of it which were familiar to them. She realised that she was incorporating into her sculpture images of people or places which actually existed but which were outside her own physical experience.
Hard on the heels of this revelation came the British Museum incident. "The idea of seeing something centuries old and being a part of it didn't really affect me very much. I wasn't terribly surprised although I knew that it wasn't one of my usual imagination things and it wasn't for my entertainment.
"What concerned me was that it was something totally out of my control. My imagination I could switch on and off practically at will. You know, if I'm on a tube train and I'm bored I can entertain myself by seeing monkeys swinging on the hand grips. But this thing in the British Museum had happened completely spontaneously."
Although, as she has said, she entertains different theories in a faddish way, the underlying theme of her belief in reincarnation is her reluctance to accept the finality of death. It's a powerful argument which has been used by some influential people. Benjamin Franklin firmly believed that he had lived before: "When I see nothing annihilated, and not even a drop of water wasted, I cannot expect the annihilation of souls, or believe that He will suffer the daily waste of millions of minds ready made that now exist and put Himself to the continual trouble of making new ones. Thus, finding myself to exist in this world, I believe I shall, in some shape or other, always exist."
Of course it's easy to read ego in that statement, a desire on Franklin's part to believe that the world couldn't go on without his illuminating presence. But, as Lene Lovich says: "It's difficult to rationalise that someone can be walking along the street, thinking, controlling a large part of their environment, then walk off the curb, get hit by a car, and that's the end of that.
"We can't be something one minute and nothing the next."
In support of such doubts Heber Curtis, an American astro-physicist, said: "With energy, matter, space and time continuous, with nothing lost or wasted, are we ourselves the only manifestation that comes to an end, ceases, is annihilated at three score years and ten?"
If it is true that we live before and will live again, why is it that we don't remember past lives. Lene Lovich believes, although it could be one of her passing theories, that between lives we may go through some form of deprogramming and that the memory is then stored in some far corner of our minds.
Scientists have already declared that we only use about 10 per cent of our brains [Note: incorrect] and that even a genius is only using about another three or four per cent, so the deprogramming idea is not so far-fetched. It also provides an easy answer to the problem of child prodigies such as Mozart: how else to explain a four-year-old writing complex symphonies except that he carried the knowledge with him from a former life?
"Some people you meet," says Lene, "even quite young children, have much deeper understanding of things than they could possibly have learned in their young lives, or even just one previous life."
There is no room in her life for organised religion; too many rules, too much restriction. But there is comfort to be had from her own beliefs, and she does accept the existence of a Deity, although she can't or won't put a name to it. "I don't fear death itself, only the possibility that it might be painful. There is a worry, of course, about the future because I don't always see it in a beautiful way.
"But I am disturbed by these people who insist on freezing themselves," she says, laughing. "I wouldn't want to come back as myself, I can't think of anything more dull.
"Whatever the world will be like in the future, I think that you need to be introduced to a society gradually, to be born into it and grow up in it so you can accept its hardships.
"Nor would I want to live forever. Much as I am enjoying this life my belief and curiosity about future lives is, I guess, greater than my interest in continuing this one indefinitely."
July 08, 2019
Melody Maker (UK; 17 March 1979)
Number two with a bullet
Lene Lovich talks to Melody Maker. Les Chappell stays strong and silent.
She is only a slip of a thing, but when Lene Lovich and her bald young escort enter the great motorway cafes of this country, people freeze momentarily over ther hamburgers and chips, a jaw or two drops, a sauce bottle is poised mid-air.
Almost everything about Lene Lovich's appearance is dark, but not her face, a pale, red-lipped oval which rightly belongs to a Poe heroine. Each finger ends in a black-painted nail, bright hoops of steel are in her ears, and the long, close-fitting dresses, worn in shades of maroon, dark blue, black and purple, contribute to a complex style that is somewhere between Romany extravagance and the kinky severity of a Victorian governess.
Lene Lovich is actually in Charles Addams territory. She and her bald companion, who is a long-standing boyfriend named Les Chappell, are a couple straight out of Addams' Nightcrawlers, two enchanted characters in a perverse, somewhat camp fairytale. He is a gentle, taciturn eunuch; she a weird, comic vamp, freshly risen from the tomb and cruising for laughs and lost souls. "This one is for people who've recently died," she always announces before one song, "Sleeping Beauty", which is about reincarnation. That's a sample of her style.
It's a look, too robust to be fey, to win prizes; it may even catch on with the Tie & Dye's Set. They stand and gape as she alternates between singing and a tenor saxophone, an instrument that makes her seem only more kooky. So she will wave to them - "This one is for the girls" - and dedicate to her fans a new number called "Joan".
She is mistress of the beguiling effect. Her famous cuckooing hiccough on "Lucky Number" is as utterly novel and individual as Daltrey's stutter on "My Generation" or Buddy Holly's hiccup. On "Say When" she leads the band, who are named the Nancy Boys, in a Devo choreography of arm movements. Her hands make shapes, her eyes roll dramatically, she whinnies like a stricken horse.
Other times, when the tempo slows, she is pathos itself. She strokes a version of Nick Lowe's "Tonight", and on her own "Too Tender (To Touch)" she beseeches and wrings from her audiences a big, silent tear. "My mother's favourite," she declares.
After a gig is finished, and the band has sunk dully in the precarious safety of a dingy dressing-room, she will welcome all those who wish to talk to her: to find about the next record, or learn the secret of her ingenious hairstyle. Her white cheeks still suffused with her exertions, she signs the pictures and record sleeves of every hopeful punter. Her constant lament is for the fans who have not managed to get into her shows, whose pleas are heard through the dressing-room window as she prepares to go onstage.
Right now she is honouring old commitments to play the clubs and the small polytechnics, although a less scrupulous artist might have blown them out on the strength of a Top Ten single. The next tour will be better because she will be playing town halls and then everyone can see her. The punk ideal still grips her.
So, as the corridors echo emptily, she packs away her own sax, grasps a battered green suitcase that moulders with the old stickers of shipping lines, and heads wearily in the direction of the group van. It's the ritual of every band on the road: as it was in the beginning, is now and forever shall be, a world without end. She always travels with the band.
Tonight they have played Portsmough Poly, a scene of celebration, but the drive on to next town or back to London is invariably for private, exhausted thoughts. As they pull out through deserted streets, a tape of War is on the eight-track, the keyboard player is rolling a spliff, and the bassist has already lain down in the back seat.
Five months ago, before the second of Stiff Records' promotional train tour, Lene Lovich and Les Chappell had had no band of their own and were completely unknown. Two months later they were playing in New York, within a few more weeks Lene Lovich had been hailed as another of Stiff's great finds, in direct line of descent from Elvis Costello and Ian Dury. At the age of almost 30 - no Siouxsie Sioux or Pauline Murray, and certainly no Rachel Sweet - she had become a rock star, doing interviews with the BBC and Daily Mirror, posing for a fashion spread in the London Evening News, being plugged every week on TOTP. The media loves a girl singer, particularly if she has something new to sell: there are just tons of them.
Lene didn't talk of this, however; the conversation was of reincarnation, a subject which apparently much preoccupied her. Her greatest wish was to set down a dream she had once had. It had come to her complete, like a motion picture: the story of a vampire Western.
She spoke softly: "I've seen dead people in a mortuary - grandfathers dying and things - and when you're looking at a dead person, you know that there's absolutely nothing there. It's like a radio set that's been switched off."
We turned off the road and onto the forecourt of a petrol station. Someone was playing music for night owls.
The people most suspicious of Lene Lovich mistrust her relationship with Stiff, and maybe one can understand their fears.
The cover of her album is a brilliant example of Stiff's opportunism and ability to conceptualise; it realises all the strange suggestions of her East European name. [Note: It was not the reason for the cover art; see albums discography for notes on "Stateless".]
Called "Stateless", the album employs the typography of computer print-out to evoke an image of alien bureaucracies. And, in a blurred black-and-white photo, a double exposure, she seems to be disappearing like ectoplasm through a high brick wall: her fingers are pressed to her temples in a feat of concentration, her face dissolves, she is going, going, gone. To the West, presumably.
It's no surprise to learn that Dave Robinson, the head of Stiff, was once a photographer. But later one finds out that "Stateless" was chosen because she was in between passports at the time. Lene Lovich turns out to be an American citizen.
She and Stiff understand each other very well, in fact. Quietly, but with great independance, she manages herself, although she is signed to a production deal with Oval, the small, South London company part-run by former writer and broadcaster Charlie Gillett.
Her appearance, just like the sound of her records, which Gillett felt she could produce herself with Chappell, is of her own invention. There is a spoof Christmas EP, recorded for Polydor in 1976 when she was a member of the Diversions soul band, and on the cover she has the same fantastic plaits. She says that her hair was first braided when she was at art school studying sculpture; it was practical, to avoid the plaster and cement. And then, when she joined bands, the Slavic look she had achieved made her stand out.
Charlie Gillett, who also recorded Ian Dury when he was with the Kilburns, recalls her entering the studio of Honky Tonk, the show he used to broadcast for Radio London, late in 1977: "She walked into the room and she looked like a star, with that amazing long hair. A tremendous sense of herself. But always a person, not a sex symbol.
"The problem was, how do you market it? The tendency is always to make something that is unusual like something else that has already been marketed. Ian Dury's success broke down a lot of scepticism. But Ian has to disguise the fact that he's not really a singer; she has a very good range."
She had gone to see Gillett about an appeal he had read on the air for a sax player. The appeal was hers, and she was miffed at having had no response. He, however, recruited her and Chappell for a band of his own, the Oval Exiles, which revolved around the songwriters Bobby Henry and Jimmy O'Neill [Note: not quite correct; see upcoming chronology] (now a member of Fingerprintz, a Gillett band which has been supporting her on a recent tour).
Stiff, says Gillett, were not interested in Bobby Henry, but they did like the demo of a Tommy James song, "I Think We're Alone Now," which he had cut with Lene. A B-side had to be quickly written, and this was "Lucky Number"; a limited edition of this single came out. Of course, "Lucky Number" eventually became the A-side and was completely re-recorded with an extra verse.
Insecure, she says, unless working, Lene had hung about for years on the fringes of music and theatre since leaving London's Central School of Art. She was incurably restless, willing to take any job that came along. And there has been a great variety.
Through the influence of a London session fixer, she made the acquaintance of French disco star Cerrone [Note: not quite correct; see upcoming page about Lene's lyric writing for other artists], and wrote the lyrics to "Supernature" and other tunes. When the Diversions supported the Trammps on a British tour, playing Birmingham Town Hall and the Hammersmith Odeon, she was invited to join their sax section. And the first time she played tenor (she is also proficient on violin and alto) was as a member of a three-girl cabaret group, the Sensations, performing for rich Scandinavian tourists on Rhodes.
"That's the stimulus I like - being thrown in at the deep end," she says.
As a jewelled dancer in London, her hair was dark and unplaited. An agent's photograph of her as such preceded the Sensations, much to her fury, at the hotel in Rhodes. She had to steal her contract back from the Greek agent, who had compelled her to sign on the Athens ferry. And then the Greek Orthodox Church threatened to excommunicate the manager of the hotel when the Sensations sang excerpts from Jesus Christ Superstar. She laughs at it all now.
"It was easy for me to get jobs that were slightly risqué. I mean, the number of times I had to leave a job after a few weeks 'cause I didn't wanna take what they considered were the fringe benefits going with it!" Her voice tinkles with amusement.
"But I did manage to gain experience at an early age, because they thought they could use a girl for a bit of decoration. I was fully aware of it, and I didn't like it one bit. I always tried to make sure that I learned something with each job I did so the next one I could have a bit more respect. And I did a lotta very crazy jobs."
Are all these stories about her, like the screams on French horror soundtracks, really true, I ask innocently?
"Yeah!" she replies, slightly amazed.
She is sitting, waiting before a show, in another drab room: it's walled with such pungent graffiti as Stukas Wank Monkeys. On her lap is balanced a plate of congealing steak and chips. The dimple in her chin makes her unexpectedly girlish, but under the harsh dressing-room lighting her face yields up the strain of touring.
"I've lived five years in the last six months," she says, and briefly droops. "But now I think I'm in a situation where I can be creative. I've been in plenty of situations where it was not very creative, but then it was only a means to an end."
As she talks, members of the band wander in and out. The bassist, Lennie Meade, and the keyboard player, Phil Ramocon, are both black; drummer Ben Overhead is a scrappy-looking white kid. All three of them have been drafted in since the Stiff shows in New York. From the adjoining room the sound of tuning-up is discordant thunder.
She comes from Detroit, and her accent has remained pronouncedly American, even though she left when she was 13. It was a tough, mostly black part of Detroit, she says, by the East river; a little awe is left in her voice.
"I was one of only about five or six white families in the whole street. I remember, we had a police station at the end of the road, and they moved it, and we swore it was because the cops didn't want to come down." She giggles. "They would never turn up until at least half-an-hour after somebody had called them, and they were only five minutes away.
"People got shot on the street, and the folks next door were running a still. There were two black families who were feuding with each other, the two grandmothers in the family. They'd send the little kids around with bricks to throw through the window."
She grew up liking Motown, naturally. This was in the day before Berry Gordy moved operations to Los Angeles.
"Everybody felt very proud," she says; she still feels proud. "I can remember Stevie Wonder when he made his first record, he was about the same age as me, and we were really excited about it. We really hoped he'd get to the charts."
For all the excitement of Tamla's music, family life in Detroit was highly disturbed. Her father, the son of a Yugoslavian immigrant to America, had met her Yorkshire mother during the last war when he was in the U.S. Merchant Navy. They had married and returned to the States; she has two sisters and a brother, all living in America now.
The father, however, had a history of mental instability. Lene's grandmother had put him in a home following the death of her husband in a hunting accident, and his treatment of his own children was violent and erratic. "I could not bring other kids home because of my dad," she recalls.
Her mother finally ran away and brought the kids to live in Hull, where Lene continued her schooling and met Les Chappell.
Later on, she says, her father came over and tried to kidnap her sisters. "One sister managed to escape, but I haven't seen the other one now for 13 years." Nor her father since the marriage broke up. And the mother also returned to Detroit after Lene left home at 15. Until she performed at New York's Bottom Line last December, Lene had not set foot on American soil again.
Art college in London, where she shared a sculpture course with Les Chappell, was not a success, either. She found herself rejecting what she saw as the rigidity and selfishness of fine art, with its intellectual halo, attitudes that she couldn't square with her growing interest in pop culture.
She taught herself to play violin, and she and Chappell would go busking in tube stations and around the West End. They joined up with a fringe theatre group, Bob Flag's Balloon & Banana Band, and during Christmas 1973 appeared at the Roundhouse in a medieval rock musical, A Feast of Fools.
For this she had learned alto. Flag was a former army band-boy who had gone on to play with David Bowie in an early rock band, the Riot Squad, and he encouraged her on this old alto she picked up. "He told me what notes to play and when. So really I got the job without knowing how to play saxophone."
It was around this time that Chappell shaved off his hair and eyebrows. She reserves an affectionate memory for his once-long hair. "But he'd cut it, kind of spiky on top, and dyed it sort of an orange colour, and just purely by coincidence Bowie at the same time had that hairdo. I don't think he liked the idea, so off it all went. It's stayed like that ever since."
Now Stiff, wouldn't you believe it, are trying to set up a promotional deal with a razor-blade manufacturer. "I've tried 'em all, and Gilette are the best," was Chappell's only rueful comment.
But in 1975, he and Lene, after further adventures in fringe theatre, threw in their lot with the Diversions, and their prospects improved a little. She played sax and sang some leads, he was on rhythm guitar.
They cut a version of "Fattie Bum Bum" for Gull; and then, early in 1976, the band signed to Polydor. In London they were now playing the main rock haunts: the Nashville, the Speak, the Dingwalls, the Rock Garden. Out of town it was small clubs with a disco audience.
She says she looked then much as she does now, but she liked to wear party dresses.
"It was a party sort of band," she reflects, "and I always wore onstage what it would be like to go to a party in.
"Les had his sharp suits, dinner suits, things like that. The others used to wear what they liked. We looked like we'd landed from another planet; we were a bit different to the rest of them."
The Diversions never did quite break through, however. In a year spent with Polydor they got barely any press. A couple of singles went nowhere. She says that the A & R man who had signed them left not long afterwards.
"No one knew what to do with us. We made an album and they didn't release it. We found ourselves running out of money."
They hatched schemes to get more money out of Polydor. Chiefly, they cut records under different names and were paid a separate advance.
As the Commandos they made "The Bump". They recorded one of her songs, an early attempt at writing called "Funny Girl," which later she was to play to Charlie Gillett. And she and Chappell cobbled up a Christmas maxi-single of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and "The Christmas Song," which they released with a B-side of their own: "Happy Christmas," a jokey studio throwaway of the kind that the Beatles used to record as flimsidisc messages to their fans. This was wholly schlock. She sounds appallingly like Bonnie Langford on "I Saw Mommy": her chirruping, adolescent vocal drives one up the wall. The record stands in relation to what she is now doing as "Laughing Gnome" does to "Heroes" in Bowie's career.
Inevitably, the Diversions quickly parted; and so, just as abruptly, did she and Chappell. For part of 1977 she worked in Europe. She says she travelled to Finland with a carnival, wrote for Cerrone, screamed in French. It was through Gillett and the success of "Lucky Number" that they reunited.
She remarks of the song, "It's about a person who is very self-contained, and everything is fine until they meet someone else. Then they realise, 'this is much better'".
In an interview on Portsmouth's Radio Victory, Lovich and Chappell are allowed to play a selection of their favourite records. Their choice is wide, from Moondog to Kraftwerk. Chappell asks for "Soul Man" by Sam & Dave; she comes up with "Escape from the Planet of the Apes" by the Baboons.
And yet, when she's asked afterwards what has influenced her own music, she stumbles in thought.
"I remember that my father used to play Tchaikovsky records as loud as he could," she replies at last. "And show tunes".
In New York, she was infuriated that critics compared her to Patti Smith; she just couldn't see it. But though she has shown herself capable of handling her own career, she still struggles to explain its meaning. "Lucky Number" is a far cry, so to speak, from "Supernature", which she describes as a science-fiction lyric about man's disastrous meddling with nature.
"I like to involve mental images," she attempts. "Mental images are real to people. When people get angry or sad, their mind is full of pictures. I try to piece together a story that contains these pictures."
I tell her that she cuts a rather unreal figure upon a stage. "I don't think so, no." She shakes her head, and considers very seriously.
"If I am removed from reality, it's only a baby step, only a small step. I'm sure that the music we do is not just a visual thing, not just a gimmick, a theatrical experience. It's clear to the people out there that it's not just that, but something real. They can get close, they can see that I'm involved; they can feel without having any bombs or special effects."
Still, one day she will indulge her fantasy life. She will make movies; maybe that vampire Western that so obsesses her. She loves movies. Her eyes go dreamy.
"I once spent about three hours on a set watching somebody hailing a taxicab in a thunderstorm. It was a gigantic hose in the air which fell down like rain. I thought it was fascinating."
Lene Lovich talks to Melody Maker. Les Chappell stays strong and silent.
She is only a slip of a thing, but when Lene Lovich and her bald young escort enter the great motorway cafes of this country, people freeze momentarily over ther hamburgers and chips, a jaw or two drops, a sauce bottle is poised mid-air.
Almost everything about Lene Lovich's appearance is dark, but not her face, a pale, red-lipped oval which rightly belongs to a Poe heroine. Each finger ends in a black-painted nail, bright hoops of steel are in her ears, and the long, close-fitting dresses, worn in shades of maroon, dark blue, black and purple, contribute to a complex style that is somewhere between Romany extravagance and the kinky severity of a Victorian governess.
Lene Lovich is actually in Charles Addams territory. She and her bald companion, who is a long-standing boyfriend named Les Chappell, are a couple straight out of Addams' Nightcrawlers, two enchanted characters in a perverse, somewhat camp fairytale. He is a gentle, taciturn eunuch; she a weird, comic vamp, freshly risen from the tomb and cruising for laughs and lost souls. "This one is for people who've recently died," she always announces before one song, "Sleeping Beauty", which is about reincarnation. That's a sample of her style.
It's a look, too robust to be fey, to win prizes; it may even catch on with the Tie & Dye's Set. They stand and gape as she alternates between singing and a tenor saxophone, an instrument that makes her seem only more kooky. So she will wave to them - "This one is for the girls" - and dedicate to her fans a new number called "Joan".
She is mistress of the beguiling effect. Her famous cuckooing hiccough on "Lucky Number" is as utterly novel and individual as Daltrey's stutter on "My Generation" or Buddy Holly's hiccup. On "Say When" she leads the band, who are named the Nancy Boys, in a Devo choreography of arm movements. Her hands make shapes, her eyes roll dramatically, she whinnies like a stricken horse.
Other times, when the tempo slows, she is pathos itself. She strokes a version of Nick Lowe's "Tonight", and on her own "Too Tender (To Touch)" she beseeches and wrings from her audiences a big, silent tear. "My mother's favourite," she declares.
After a gig is finished, and the band has sunk dully in the precarious safety of a dingy dressing-room, she will welcome all those who wish to talk to her: to find about the next record, or learn the secret of her ingenious hairstyle. Her white cheeks still suffused with her exertions, she signs the pictures and record sleeves of every hopeful punter. Her constant lament is for the fans who have not managed to get into her shows, whose pleas are heard through the dressing-room window as she prepares to go onstage.
Right now she is honouring old commitments to play the clubs and the small polytechnics, although a less scrupulous artist might have blown them out on the strength of a Top Ten single. The next tour will be better because she will be playing town halls and then everyone can see her. The punk ideal still grips her.
So, as the corridors echo emptily, she packs away her own sax, grasps a battered green suitcase that moulders with the old stickers of shipping lines, and heads wearily in the direction of the group van. It's the ritual of every band on the road: as it was in the beginning, is now and forever shall be, a world without end. She always travels with the band.
Tonight they have played Portsmough Poly, a scene of celebration, but the drive on to next town or back to London is invariably for private, exhausted thoughts. As they pull out through deserted streets, a tape of War is on the eight-track, the keyboard player is rolling a spliff, and the bassist has already lain down in the back seat.
Five months ago, before the second of Stiff Records' promotional train tour, Lene Lovich and Les Chappell had had no band of their own and were completely unknown. Two months later they were playing in New York, within a few more weeks Lene Lovich had been hailed as another of Stiff's great finds, in direct line of descent from Elvis Costello and Ian Dury. At the age of almost 30 - no Siouxsie Sioux or Pauline Murray, and certainly no Rachel Sweet - she had become a rock star, doing interviews with the BBC and Daily Mirror, posing for a fashion spread in the London Evening News, being plugged every week on TOTP. The media loves a girl singer, particularly if she has something new to sell: there are just tons of them.
Lene didn't talk of this, however; the conversation was of reincarnation, a subject which apparently much preoccupied her. Her greatest wish was to set down a dream she had once had. It had come to her complete, like a motion picture: the story of a vampire Western.
She spoke softly: "I've seen dead people in a mortuary - grandfathers dying and things - and when you're looking at a dead person, you know that there's absolutely nothing there. It's like a radio set that's been switched off."
We turned off the road and onto the forecourt of a petrol station. Someone was playing music for night owls.
The people most suspicious of Lene Lovich mistrust her relationship with Stiff, and maybe one can understand their fears.
The cover of her album is a brilliant example of Stiff's opportunism and ability to conceptualise; it realises all the strange suggestions of her East European name. [Note: It was not the reason for the cover art; see albums discography for notes on "Stateless".]
Called "Stateless", the album employs the typography of computer print-out to evoke an image of alien bureaucracies. And, in a blurred black-and-white photo, a double exposure, she seems to be disappearing like ectoplasm through a high brick wall: her fingers are pressed to her temples in a feat of concentration, her face dissolves, she is going, going, gone. To the West, presumably.
It's no surprise to learn that Dave Robinson, the head of Stiff, was once a photographer. But later one finds out that "Stateless" was chosen because she was in between passports at the time. Lene Lovich turns out to be an American citizen.
She and Stiff understand each other very well, in fact. Quietly, but with great independance, she manages herself, although she is signed to a production deal with Oval, the small, South London company part-run by former writer and broadcaster Charlie Gillett.
Her appearance, just like the sound of her records, which Gillett felt she could produce herself with Chappell, is of her own invention. There is a spoof Christmas EP, recorded for Polydor in 1976 when she was a member of the Diversions soul band, and on the cover she has the same fantastic plaits. She says that her hair was first braided when she was at art school studying sculpture; it was practical, to avoid the plaster and cement. And then, when she joined bands, the Slavic look she had achieved made her stand out.
Charlie Gillett, who also recorded Ian Dury when he was with the Kilburns, recalls her entering the studio of Honky Tonk, the show he used to broadcast for Radio London, late in 1977: "She walked into the room and she looked like a star, with that amazing long hair. A tremendous sense of herself. But always a person, not a sex symbol.
"The problem was, how do you market it? The tendency is always to make something that is unusual like something else that has already been marketed. Ian Dury's success broke down a lot of scepticism. But Ian has to disguise the fact that he's not really a singer; she has a very good range."
She had gone to see Gillett about an appeal he had read on the air for a sax player. The appeal was hers, and she was miffed at having had no response. He, however, recruited her and Chappell for a band of his own, the Oval Exiles, which revolved around the songwriters Bobby Henry and Jimmy O'Neill [Note: not quite correct; see upcoming chronology] (now a member of Fingerprintz, a Gillett band which has been supporting her on a recent tour).
Stiff, says Gillett, were not interested in Bobby Henry, but they did like the demo of a Tommy James song, "I Think We're Alone Now," which he had cut with Lene. A B-side had to be quickly written, and this was "Lucky Number"; a limited edition of this single came out. Of course, "Lucky Number" eventually became the A-side and was completely re-recorded with an extra verse.
Insecure, she says, unless working, Lene had hung about for years on the fringes of music and theatre since leaving London's Central School of Art. She was incurably restless, willing to take any job that came along. And there has been a great variety.
Through the influence of a London session fixer, she made the acquaintance of French disco star Cerrone [Note: not quite correct; see upcoming page about Lene's lyric writing for other artists], and wrote the lyrics to "Supernature" and other tunes. When the Diversions supported the Trammps on a British tour, playing Birmingham Town Hall and the Hammersmith Odeon, she was invited to join their sax section. And the first time she played tenor (she is also proficient on violin and alto) was as a member of a three-girl cabaret group, the Sensations, performing for rich Scandinavian tourists on Rhodes.
"That's the stimulus I like - being thrown in at the deep end," she says.
As a jewelled dancer in London, her hair was dark and unplaited. An agent's photograph of her as such preceded the Sensations, much to her fury, at the hotel in Rhodes. She had to steal her contract back from the Greek agent, who had compelled her to sign on the Athens ferry. And then the Greek Orthodox Church threatened to excommunicate the manager of the hotel when the Sensations sang excerpts from Jesus Christ Superstar. She laughs at it all now.
"It was easy for me to get jobs that were slightly risqué. I mean, the number of times I had to leave a job after a few weeks 'cause I didn't wanna take what they considered were the fringe benefits going with it!" Her voice tinkles with amusement.
"But I did manage to gain experience at an early age, because they thought they could use a girl for a bit of decoration. I was fully aware of it, and I didn't like it one bit. I always tried to make sure that I learned something with each job I did so the next one I could have a bit more respect. And I did a lotta very crazy jobs."
Are all these stories about her, like the screams on French horror soundtracks, really true, I ask innocently?
"Yeah!" she replies, slightly amazed.
She is sitting, waiting before a show, in another drab room: it's walled with such pungent graffiti as Stukas Wank Monkeys. On her lap is balanced a plate of congealing steak and chips. The dimple in her chin makes her unexpectedly girlish, but under the harsh dressing-room lighting her face yields up the strain of touring.
"I've lived five years in the last six months," she says, and briefly droops. "But now I think I'm in a situation where I can be creative. I've been in plenty of situations where it was not very creative, but then it was only a means to an end."
As she talks, members of the band wander in and out. The bassist, Lennie Meade, and the keyboard player, Phil Ramocon, are both black; drummer Ben Overhead is a scrappy-looking white kid. All three of them have been drafted in since the Stiff shows in New York. From the adjoining room the sound of tuning-up is discordant thunder.
She comes from Detroit, and her accent has remained pronouncedly American, even though she left when she was 13. It was a tough, mostly black part of Detroit, she says, by the East river; a little awe is left in her voice.
"I was one of only about five or six white families in the whole street. I remember, we had a police station at the end of the road, and they moved it, and we swore it was because the cops didn't want to come down." She giggles. "They would never turn up until at least half-an-hour after somebody had called them, and they were only five minutes away.
"People got shot on the street, and the folks next door were running a still. There were two black families who were feuding with each other, the two grandmothers in the family. They'd send the little kids around with bricks to throw through the window."
She grew up liking Motown, naturally. This was in the day before Berry Gordy moved operations to Los Angeles.
"Everybody felt very proud," she says; she still feels proud. "I can remember Stevie Wonder when he made his first record, he was about the same age as me, and we were really excited about it. We really hoped he'd get to the charts."
For all the excitement of Tamla's music, family life in Detroit was highly disturbed. Her father, the son of a Yugoslavian immigrant to America, had met her Yorkshire mother during the last war when he was in the U.S. Merchant Navy. They had married and returned to the States; she has two sisters and a brother, all living in America now.
The father, however, had a history of mental instability. Lene's grandmother had put him in a home following the death of her husband in a hunting accident, and his treatment of his own children was violent and erratic. "I could not bring other kids home because of my dad," she recalls.
Her mother finally ran away and brought the kids to live in Hull, where Lene continued her schooling and met Les Chappell.
Later on, she says, her father came over and tried to kidnap her sisters. "One sister managed to escape, but I haven't seen the other one now for 13 years." Nor her father since the marriage broke up. And the mother also returned to Detroit after Lene left home at 15. Until she performed at New York's Bottom Line last December, Lene had not set foot on American soil again.
Art college in London, where she shared a sculpture course with Les Chappell, was not a success, either. She found herself rejecting what she saw as the rigidity and selfishness of fine art, with its intellectual halo, attitudes that she couldn't square with her growing interest in pop culture.
She taught herself to play violin, and she and Chappell would go busking in tube stations and around the West End. They joined up with a fringe theatre group, Bob Flag's Balloon & Banana Band, and during Christmas 1973 appeared at the Roundhouse in a medieval rock musical, A Feast of Fools.
For this she had learned alto. Flag was a former army band-boy who had gone on to play with David Bowie in an early rock band, the Riot Squad, and he encouraged her on this old alto she picked up. "He told me what notes to play and when. So really I got the job without knowing how to play saxophone."
It was around this time that Chappell shaved off his hair and eyebrows. She reserves an affectionate memory for his once-long hair. "But he'd cut it, kind of spiky on top, and dyed it sort of an orange colour, and just purely by coincidence Bowie at the same time had that hairdo. I don't think he liked the idea, so off it all went. It's stayed like that ever since."
Now Stiff, wouldn't you believe it, are trying to set up a promotional deal with a razor-blade manufacturer. "I've tried 'em all, and Gilette are the best," was Chappell's only rueful comment.
But in 1975, he and Lene, after further adventures in fringe theatre, threw in their lot with the Diversions, and their prospects improved a little. She played sax and sang some leads, he was on rhythm guitar.
They cut a version of "Fattie Bum Bum" for Gull; and then, early in 1976, the band signed to Polydor. In London they were now playing the main rock haunts: the Nashville, the Speak, the Dingwalls, the Rock Garden. Out of town it was small clubs with a disco audience.
She says she looked then much as she does now, but she liked to wear party dresses.
"It was a party sort of band," she reflects, "and I always wore onstage what it would be like to go to a party in.
"Les had his sharp suits, dinner suits, things like that. The others used to wear what they liked. We looked like we'd landed from another planet; we were a bit different to the rest of them."
The Diversions never did quite break through, however. In a year spent with Polydor they got barely any press. A couple of singles went nowhere. She says that the A & R man who had signed them left not long afterwards.
"No one knew what to do with us. We made an album and they didn't release it. We found ourselves running out of money."
They hatched schemes to get more money out of Polydor. Chiefly, they cut records under different names and were paid a separate advance.
As the Commandos they made "The Bump". They recorded one of her songs, an early attempt at writing called "Funny Girl," which later she was to play to Charlie Gillett. And she and Chappell cobbled up a Christmas maxi-single of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" and "The Christmas Song," which they released with a B-side of their own: "Happy Christmas," a jokey studio throwaway of the kind that the Beatles used to record as flimsidisc messages to their fans. This was wholly schlock. She sounds appallingly like Bonnie Langford on "I Saw Mommy": her chirruping, adolescent vocal drives one up the wall. The record stands in relation to what she is now doing as "Laughing Gnome" does to "Heroes" in Bowie's career.
Inevitably, the Diversions quickly parted; and so, just as abruptly, did she and Chappell. For part of 1977 she worked in Europe. She says she travelled to Finland with a carnival, wrote for Cerrone, screamed in French. It was through Gillett and the success of "Lucky Number" that they reunited.
She remarks of the song, "It's about a person who is very self-contained, and everything is fine until they meet someone else. Then they realise, 'this is much better'".
In an interview on Portsmouth's Radio Victory, Lovich and Chappell are allowed to play a selection of their favourite records. Their choice is wide, from Moondog to Kraftwerk. Chappell asks for "Soul Man" by Sam & Dave; she comes up with "Escape from the Planet of the Apes" by the Baboons.
And yet, when she's asked afterwards what has influenced her own music, she stumbles in thought.
"I remember that my father used to play Tchaikovsky records as loud as he could," she replies at last. "And show tunes".
In New York, she was infuriated that critics compared her to Patti Smith; she just couldn't see it. But though she has shown herself capable of handling her own career, she still struggles to explain its meaning. "Lucky Number" is a far cry, so to speak, from "Supernature", which she describes as a science-fiction lyric about man's disastrous meddling with nature.
"I like to involve mental images," she attempts. "Mental images are real to people. When people get angry or sad, their mind is full of pictures. I try to piece together a story that contains these pictures."
I tell her that she cuts a rather unreal figure upon a stage. "I don't think so, no." She shakes her head, and considers very seriously.
"If I am removed from reality, it's only a baby step, only a small step. I'm sure that the music we do is not just a visual thing, not just a gimmick, a theatrical experience. It's clear to the people out there that it's not just that, but something real. They can get close, they can see that I'm involved; they can feel without having any bombs or special effects."
Still, one day she will indulge her fantasy life. She will make movies; maybe that vampire Western that so obsesses her. She loves movies. Her eyes go dreamy.
"I once spent about three hours on a set watching somebody hailing a taxicab in a thunderstorm. It was a gigantic hose in the air which fell down like rain. I thought it was fascinating."
July 06, 2019
Soho News (New York; 02 April 1980)
LENE LOVICH AIN'T SO STRANGE
It's a bleak day, full of uneasy coincidences. The low-budget rigors of Lene Lovich's first real U.S. tour have caught up with her in a series of mishaps. It's been a successful five-week swing; Lene's growing cult audience - many of them bought her records as imports after "Lucky Number" became a British hit - hasn't seen her in person since the Be Stiff Tour in 1978, and this time around she's hitting most cities for the first time. The demand for tickets caused shows to be added around the country, and the band has barely had a day off. Now, three days from the end of the tour, Lene's nearly flat with exhaustion - when she isn't up on stage.
In Philadelphia the other night a balky microphone caught her in the mouth; yesterday at the Mudd Club - where hundreds of fans queued outside in the rain - she stepped through a hole in the makeshift stage extension. Today she's fighting the flu and a quick-march schedule - thus the helicopter, an extravagant one-shot. "It was outrageous," murmurs Lovich, "totally unreal...." Sitting at a table in an acoustic-tiled classroom, Lovich holds herself with dancing-school correctness; exact, shoulders-back posture, hands folded in her lap. She coughs politely into a fist, dabs with a tissue at her blue-green eyes. Dark purple makeup - to match her mouth - makes her eyebrows stand out like bruises.
Touch-Tone of Quality
Like her appearance, Lene's songs (written with guitarist/boyfriend Les Chappell) are the perfect blend of intuition and construction. Whimsical but not random, crafted but not gimmicky, they stack up musical signposts around what Lene calls a "pure idea." On Stateless, Lovich's 1979 debut eventually picked up by Epic Records in the States, the smart, adult love songs augured a thousand different kinds of romance by piling up recognizable pop touches, doubling and tripling them into musical puns - like Lene's own Touch-Tone beeping on "Lucky Number." The songs on Flex, her new album, still use production touches - and the whoop and sway of her voice - to convey ambiguity, fanning out possible interpretations like a peacock's tail.
But where the first LP held stories, Flex offers lessons and exhortations; if Stateless showed Lene quivering on the brink of actions, Flex shows her halfway there - wherever there is - extending a hand to stragglers and confidently pointing out obstacles like an Alpine guide. With romance no longer the central metaphor, the songs have a different feel - less hooky than textural, less pop than seductively rhythmic (a sound, I realized while watching her in concert, that's perfectly designed for her new, young band).
It's still the small touches that count in Lene's songs, the telling details. By changing just one word, she turns "The Night" (a 10-year-old Frankie Valli song so rare, she laughs, that the publisher didn't remember it) into her song. Instead "beware of his promise," Lene sings "beware of their promise," giving the song a characteristic tinge of ambiguity and a three-quarter turn into darkness. Seduction becomes abduction, mistaken conversion, or just a self-deluded cast of mind.
A lot of Lovich's songs are concerned with misleading temptations - the apple, the stranger, the lure of complacency, the inviting path that twists into shadow. In "Home", you were never sure whether she was running to or from something; in "Angels," the single off her new album, the burst-of-faith chorus, "the Angels watch my every move," has overtones that are almost sinister. "Many people have taken that song totally superficially," Lene says, "and not seen the ominous side to it. There is a scary side, as far as I'm concerned. A lot of people find themselves in that situation - and not just with the literal angels. You could talk about the police in the same way... or," she adds, "you could talk about your parents. Anything that's meant to be protective but at the same time is constricting and could strangle you."
Motown Menace
Lene herself left home at 15 after a turbulent, traumatic childhood. Raised on the south side of Detroit (her accent is British-clipped with American vowels) she has a British mother and an American father, the son of a Yugoslav immigrant. Her father - who had a history of mental troubles - was given to outbreaks of violence that made home life intolerable; when Lene was 13 her mother left him and took the children to live in Yorkshire. "I had to be fairly good on survival generally," says Lene soberly. "I was quite a tough little kid - but at the same time, there was a lot of mental torture at home which left me insecure, quite unconfident, and I had to gain a bit of confidence. You have to be tough to survive school life and things like that and also the emotional ups and downs at home. I think because I survived those two things, I'm OK. I mean, if I hadn't I'd probably be some psychopath." She gives a laugh. "Really, I'd probably be a menace to society."
When her family returned to the United States, Lene enrolled in art school, where she met Les Chappell. She quickly grew disillusioned with sculpture ("fine for therapeutic reasons") and, before finding her niche in music, ran through a staggering set of oddball jobs: she played in a series of bands with Les, dabbled in movies, dubbed screams into a French horror film ("it's hard to scream on cue"), wrote the lyrics for a disco album, played sax in an all-girl trio and worked as an Oriental dancer. "It's such a long list because I was always experimenting," says Lene. "I never did any of those things very long; it was always in an effort to come to a better understanding of what I really wanted to do."
Now that she knows, her songs reflect the search, praising self-sufficiency, differentness and the courage of conviction. "Joan" is an explicit statement of purpose: eerie verses with scourging-of-Christ moans in the background alternate with a chorus fanfare (from Lene's own tenor sax, double-tracked).
"It's meant to be thrilling," states Lene. "It's meant to be inspiring. I just want to encourage people to be brave enough to trust their own ideas. Sometimes even your best friend will try to dissuade you from doing something that may seem a little illogical. I think that 75 percent of the time you know what's good for you. And you've got to go through those things in order to sort yourself out. You can't just sit in your room all the time and say, "I'm not going to do that because it might be a bit dangerous." I'm against negative attitudes, basically on principle.
"You could take the story of "Joan" literally," she adds, "and say that's me talking to myself. I had so many knockbacks about my voice - so many people told me I couldn't sing - that if I had really listened to them, I'd be working at Woolworth's now."
The fact that she'd stayed strong without growing cynical - even in the face of the music business - has a lot to do, says Lene, with "having a partner to work with. Les and I care enough about each other that there's never any ulterior motive in what we do. What we do is for the good of each other. Sharing that, the problems you come across are not that hard." Lene shifts in her seat, smooths out her skirt. "I'm lucky, I'm very lucky," she admits. "I don't know if it's just natural greed in people, that they always think they have to find something better.
"I suppose that my feelings towards finding partners," she adds thoughtfully, "were distorted in many ways by my family life. I guess I always looked beyond conventional good looks for some kindness in the heart, some kind of sincerity. I think I've always kind of ignored appearance - I just get a feel from people. Quite often appearance is a distraction. That's why I like to do shows - maybe people get a strange feeling, a strange idea of me if they just see a photograph." Lene's face turns quizzical, then indignant. "I get a lot of stupid song tapes sent to me - things I would never do in a million years. They're on weird subjects - about chopping up your parents or something - or some kind of deliberately spooky thing. I never sing about anything that I don't have personal experience with. I hate it when bands to that - it's obviously very shallow." She sighs.
"It's difficult to convince people that - you know - not everybody is the same. It appears to be quite logical to me: people are different. But they think, if you're different, there must be some motive behind it. They can't believe that you're just normally like you are. But if people come to see the concerts, I think they get an understanding of what I'm trying to say - a feel for what I am."
It's a bleak day, full of uneasy coincidences. The low-budget rigors of Lene Lovich's first real U.S. tour have caught up with her in a series of mishaps. It's been a successful five-week swing; Lene's growing cult audience - many of them bought her records as imports after "Lucky Number" became a British hit - hasn't seen her in person since the Be Stiff Tour in 1978, and this time around she's hitting most cities for the first time. The demand for tickets caused shows to be added around the country, and the band has barely had a day off. Now, three days from the end of the tour, Lene's nearly flat with exhaustion - when she isn't up on stage.
In Philadelphia the other night a balky microphone caught her in the mouth; yesterday at the Mudd Club - where hundreds of fans queued outside in the rain - she stepped through a hole in the makeshift stage extension. Today she's fighting the flu and a quick-march schedule - thus the helicopter, an extravagant one-shot. "It was outrageous," murmurs Lovich, "totally unreal...." Sitting at a table in an acoustic-tiled classroom, Lovich holds herself with dancing-school correctness; exact, shoulders-back posture, hands folded in her lap. She coughs politely into a fist, dabs with a tissue at her blue-green eyes. Dark purple makeup - to match her mouth - makes her eyebrows stand out like bruises.
Touch-Tone of Quality
Like her appearance, Lene's songs (written with guitarist/boyfriend Les Chappell) are the perfect blend of intuition and construction. Whimsical but not random, crafted but not gimmicky, they stack up musical signposts around what Lene calls a "pure idea." On Stateless, Lovich's 1979 debut eventually picked up by Epic Records in the States, the smart, adult love songs augured a thousand different kinds of romance by piling up recognizable pop touches, doubling and tripling them into musical puns - like Lene's own Touch-Tone beeping on "Lucky Number." The songs on Flex, her new album, still use production touches - and the whoop and sway of her voice - to convey ambiguity, fanning out possible interpretations like a peacock's tail.
But where the first LP held stories, Flex offers lessons and exhortations; if Stateless showed Lene quivering on the brink of actions, Flex shows her halfway there - wherever there is - extending a hand to stragglers and confidently pointing out obstacles like an Alpine guide. With romance no longer the central metaphor, the songs have a different feel - less hooky than textural, less pop than seductively rhythmic (a sound, I realized while watching her in concert, that's perfectly designed for her new, young band).
It's still the small touches that count in Lene's songs, the telling details. By changing just one word, she turns "The Night" (a 10-year-old Frankie Valli song so rare, she laughs, that the publisher didn't remember it) into her song. Instead "beware of his promise," Lene sings "beware of their promise," giving the song a characteristic tinge of ambiguity and a three-quarter turn into darkness. Seduction becomes abduction, mistaken conversion, or just a self-deluded cast of mind.
A lot of Lovich's songs are concerned with misleading temptations - the apple, the stranger, the lure of complacency, the inviting path that twists into shadow. In "Home", you were never sure whether she was running to or from something; in "Angels," the single off her new album, the burst-of-faith chorus, "the Angels watch my every move," has overtones that are almost sinister. "Many people have taken that song totally superficially," Lene says, "and not seen the ominous side to it. There is a scary side, as far as I'm concerned. A lot of people find themselves in that situation - and not just with the literal angels. You could talk about the police in the same way... or," she adds, "you could talk about your parents. Anything that's meant to be protective but at the same time is constricting and could strangle you."
Motown Menace
Lene herself left home at 15 after a turbulent, traumatic childhood. Raised on the south side of Detroit (her accent is British-clipped with American vowels) she has a British mother and an American father, the son of a Yugoslav immigrant. Her father - who had a history of mental troubles - was given to outbreaks of violence that made home life intolerable; when Lene was 13 her mother left him and took the children to live in Yorkshire. "I had to be fairly good on survival generally," says Lene soberly. "I was quite a tough little kid - but at the same time, there was a lot of mental torture at home which left me insecure, quite unconfident, and I had to gain a bit of confidence. You have to be tough to survive school life and things like that and also the emotional ups and downs at home. I think because I survived those two things, I'm OK. I mean, if I hadn't I'd probably be some psychopath." She gives a laugh. "Really, I'd probably be a menace to society."
When her family returned to the United States, Lene enrolled in art school, where she met Les Chappell. She quickly grew disillusioned with sculpture ("fine for therapeutic reasons") and, before finding her niche in music, ran through a staggering set of oddball jobs: she played in a series of bands with Les, dabbled in movies, dubbed screams into a French horror film ("it's hard to scream on cue"), wrote the lyrics for a disco album, played sax in an all-girl trio and worked as an Oriental dancer. "It's such a long list because I was always experimenting," says Lene. "I never did any of those things very long; it was always in an effort to come to a better understanding of what I really wanted to do."
Now that she knows, her songs reflect the search, praising self-sufficiency, differentness and the courage of conviction. "Joan" is an explicit statement of purpose: eerie verses with scourging-of-Christ moans in the background alternate with a chorus fanfare (from Lene's own tenor sax, double-tracked).
"It's meant to be thrilling," states Lene. "It's meant to be inspiring. I just want to encourage people to be brave enough to trust their own ideas. Sometimes even your best friend will try to dissuade you from doing something that may seem a little illogical. I think that 75 percent of the time you know what's good for you. And you've got to go through those things in order to sort yourself out. You can't just sit in your room all the time and say, "I'm not going to do that because it might be a bit dangerous." I'm against negative attitudes, basically on principle.
"You could take the story of "Joan" literally," she adds, "and say that's me talking to myself. I had so many knockbacks about my voice - so many people told me I couldn't sing - that if I had really listened to them, I'd be working at Woolworth's now."
The fact that she'd stayed strong without growing cynical - even in the face of the music business - has a lot to do, says Lene, with "having a partner to work with. Les and I care enough about each other that there's never any ulterior motive in what we do. What we do is for the good of each other. Sharing that, the problems you come across are not that hard." Lene shifts in her seat, smooths out her skirt. "I'm lucky, I'm very lucky," she admits. "I don't know if it's just natural greed in people, that they always think they have to find something better.
"I suppose that my feelings towards finding partners," she adds thoughtfully, "were distorted in many ways by my family life. I guess I always looked beyond conventional good looks for some kindness in the heart, some kind of sincerity. I think I've always kind of ignored appearance - I just get a feel from people. Quite often appearance is a distraction. That's why I like to do shows - maybe people get a strange feeling, a strange idea of me if they just see a photograph." Lene's face turns quizzical, then indignant. "I get a lot of stupid song tapes sent to me - things I would never do in a million years. They're on weird subjects - about chopping up your parents or something - or some kind of deliberately spooky thing. I never sing about anything that I don't have personal experience with. I hate it when bands to that - it's obviously very shallow." She sighs.
"It's difficult to convince people that - you know - not everybody is the same. It appears to be quite logical to me: people are different. But they think, if you're different, there must be some motive behind it. They can't believe that you're just normally like you are. But if people come to see the concerts, I think they get an understanding of what I'm trying to say - a feel for what I am."
June 30, 2019
Singles discography
Also scroll down to "Formerly planned releases" and "Other releases" sections.
Specifications about a release behind a slash (such as "7" / 12" (b: ...)" or "7" / 12" (limited)", etc.) refer only to this release, not to both formats.
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"I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" [as Léne Lovich]
7"
a: "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus"
b: "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)" / "Happy Christmas"
Solo single while Lene was part of The Diversions.
"Happy Christmas": First composition by Lene Lovich and Les Chappell on disc (see upcoming detailed overview of all songs).
UK (12 November 1976)
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"I Think We're Alone Now"
7"
a: "I Think We're Alone Now"
b: "Lucky Number" (prior to album recording)
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"I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus" [as Léne Lovich]
7"
a: "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus"
b: "The Christmas Song (Merry Christmas to You)" / "Happy Christmas"
Solo single while Lene was part of The Diversions.
"Happy Christmas": First composition by Lene Lovich and Les Chappell on disc (see upcoming detailed overview of all songs).
UK (12 November 1976)
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"I Think We're Alone Now"
7"
a: "I Think We're Alone Now"
b: "Lucky Number" (prior to album recording)
7"
a: "I Think We're Alone Now" (Japanese version)
b: "Lucky Number" (prior to album recording)
UK (14 July 1978); also promo
South Africa (1979)
Spain (1979); also promo
"I Think We're Alone Now" (Japanese version): UK (July 1978); limited
"I Think We're Alone Now" (Japanese version): Also released on various CDs.
"Lucky Number" (prior to album recording): Also released on "Toy Box" 4-CD set (2023).
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"Lucky Number" (single remix)
Single remix of album recording, as subsequently released on "Stateless" (second and third releases) (see albums discography for different releases of "Stateless").
7"
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "Home" (original mix, as released on "Stateless" (first release, and subsequently on second release))
12"
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "Home" (original mix) / "Lucky Number" (Version)
7" (US)
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "Lucky Number" (extended version ("Slavic Dance Version"))
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "Lucky Number" (extended version ("Slavic Dance Version"))
"Lucky Number" (Version): Instrumental version with some vocals.
"Lucky Number" (extended version) called "Slavic Dance Version" on US release, "Dance Version" on Canadian release (see below).
See below for 12" releases of "Lucky Number" (extended version) (Canada, France, US (two promo releases)).
UK (26 January 1979); 7" / 12" ((? 02 February) 1979); 7" also promo ((? 19 January) 1979)
Australia (March 1979); 7"
Belgium; 7" / 12" (b: "Home")
Canada (1979); 12" (a: "Lucky Number" (extended version ("Dance Version")) // b: "Say When" (remix, as released on "Stateless" (third release)) / "Home" (remix, as released on "Stateless" (third release)))
France; 7" (b: "I Think We're Alone Now") / 12" (test pressing 29 May 1979; not actual release date) (a: "Lucky Number" (extended version (not mentioned on disc or sleeve)) // b: "I Think We're Alone Now" / "Home" (original mix))
Germany; 7" / 12"
Greece; 7" / 12" (b: "Home")
Italy (early 1980); 7" (b: "Home" (remix, as released on "Stateless" (third release))); also promo
Japan; 7"
Mexico (1980); 7" / 12" (b: "Home")
Netherlands (10 March 1979); 7" / 12"
New Zealand; 7" / 12"
Portugal; 7" / 12"
Spain; 7" / 12"; 7" also promo
US (June 1979); 7" (see above) / 12" (promo; a: "Lucky Number" (extended version ("Slavic Dance Version")) // b: "Lucky Number" / "Lucky Number" (Version)) / 12" (promo; a: "Lucky Number" (extended version ("Slavic Dance Version")) // b: "Home" (remix, as released on "Stateless" (third release)) / "I Think We're Alone Now"); 7" also promo
"Lucky Number" (Version), (extended version): Also released on "Toy Box" 4-CD set (2023).
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"Say When" (remix)
"Say When" (remix)
Remixed for "Stateless" (third release) (released after "Say When" single; see albums discography).
7"
a: "Say When"
b: "One Lonely Heart"
12"
a: "Say When"
b: "One Lonely Heart" / "Big Bird"
"One Lonely Heart", "Big Bird" recorded in late March 1979.
UK (11 May 1979); 7" / 12"; 7" also promo (single-sided) ((? 04 May) 1979)
Australia (August 1979); 7" / 12" (limited)
Belgium; 7" (b: "One Lonely Heart" / "Big Bird")
France; 7"
Germany; 7"
Italy (August 1979); 7" (b: "Home" (original mix, as released on "Stateless" (first and second releases (both unreleased in Italy; see albums discography)))); also promo
Netherlands (19 May 1979); 7" / 12"
New Zealand; 7" (b: "I Think We're Alone Now")
Spain; 7"; also promo
"One Lonely Heart", "Big Bird": Also released on various CDs.
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________________________________________________________________________________________________
"New Toy"
7"
a: "New Toy"
b: "Cats Away" (single mix)
7" (Italy)
a: "Blue Hotel"
b: "Details" (re-recording) (as previously released on "New Toy" EP; see albums discography)
7" (Germany)
a: "Blue Hotel"
b: "O Seasons O Castles" (complete)
7"
a: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (single mix)
b: "Blue"
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"Blue Hotel" (from "No Man's Land")
Australia (late April or early May 1983)
Instrumental, Instrumental - single edit: Instrumental version with some vocals.
________________________________________________________________________________________________
"Wonderland" (single re-recording)
12"
a: "Wonderland" (New York Dance Mix) / "Wonderland" (New York Dance Mix - radio edit)
Recorded in 1988 or early 1989; released prior to earlier recorded album version (see albums discography).
________________________________________________________________________________________________
"Make Believe" (single mix)
7"
a: "Make Believe"
b: "Shadow Walk"
Transposed verses compared to album version (see albums discography).
________________________________________________________________________________________________
"The Wicked Witch" recorded and mixed by Lene Lovich and Les Chappell) in 1994. "Home" recorded in 1995 and mixed in late 1996.
See also "Other recordings'' page for "The Wicked Witch" (album mix) and upcoming detailed overview of all songs.
online release (04 January 2019)
________________________________________________________________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________________________________
See also main section for US promo release.
"Home" (single edit)
Single edit of remix from "Stateless" (third release).
7"
a: "Home"
b: "Writing on the Wall" (remix, as released on "Stateless" (second and third releases))
"What Will I Do Without You" (album version) / "Lucky Number"
"Bird Song"
7"
a: "Bird Song"
b: "Trixi"
12"
a: "Bird Song"
b: "Too Tender (To Touch)" (remix, as released on "Stateless" (third release)) / "Trixi"
UK (28 September 1979); 7" / 12"; 7" also promo / 12" also promo (very limited; single-sided; picture disc)
Australia (November 1979); 7"
Belgium; 7" (b: "Too Tender (To Touch)" / "Trixi")
Germany; 7" / 12" (b: "Too Tender (To Touch)"
France; 7" / 12"
Japan (May 1980); 7" / 12" (b: "Trixi"); 7" also promo
Netherlands (06 October 1979); 7"
Scandinavia; 7" / 12"
Spain; 7"; also promo
"Trixi": Also released on various CDs.
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"Angels"
7"
a: "Angels"
b: "The Fly"
12"
a: "Angels"
b: "The Fall" / "The Fly"
"The Fall" mixed on 04 February 1980.
UK (18 January 1980); 7" / 12" (February 1980); 7" also promo
"The Fall" mixed on 04 February 1980.
UK (18 January 1980); 7" / 12" (February 1980); 7" also promo
Australia (October 1980); 7"
Belgium; 7"; translucent orange vinyl
Japan; 7"
Netherlands (26 January 1980); 7"
New Zealand; 7"
Portugal; 7"
Spain; 7"; also promo
"The Fly", "The Fall": Also released on various CDs.
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"What Will I Do Without You" (single version)
Different recording than album version.
double 7"
1 a: "What Will I Do Without You"
1 b: "Joan"
2 a: "Monkey Talk" (live) / "The Night" (live)
2 b: "Too Tender (To Touch)" (live) / "You Can't Kill Me" (live)
1 b: "Joan"
2 a: "Monkey Talk" (live) / "The Night" (live)
2 b: "Too Tender (To Touch)" (live) / "You Can't Kill Me" (live)
Recorded in 1979.
Disc 2: Live at the Lyceum/London, 03 February 1980. Produced and mixed by Bazza.
UK (14 March 1980); double 7"; disc 1 also jukebox promo
Australia (April 1980); 7" (disc 1) / double 7" (limited)
France; double 7"
Germany (April 1980); 7" (a: "What Will I Do Without You" / "The Night" (live) // b: "You Can't Kill Me" (live) / "Monkey Talk" (live)) / double 7" (limited, 300 copies)
Italy; double 7"
Netherlands (05 April 1980); double 7"
Portugal; 7" (a: "What Will I Do Without You" / "The Night" (live) // b: "Too Tender (To Touch)" (live) / "You Can't Kill Me" (live))
Also released on "Hotel Blue" compilation album (vinyl) (Italy (1982)) and "Toy Box" 4-CD set (2023).
Live tracks from disc 2: Also released on "Toy Box" 4-CD set (2023).
See also "Other releases" section for "What Will I Do Without You" (album version).
________________________________________________________________________________________________
b: "Monkey Talk" (live)
"The Night" remixed on 05 February 1980 for single release.
"Monkey Talk" (live) as released on "What Will I Do Without You" double 7".
"The Night" (remix)
7"
a: "The Night"b: "Monkey Talk" (live)
"The Night" remixed on 05 February 1980 for single release.
"Monkey Talk" (live) as released on "What Will I Do Without You" double 7".
US (March 1980 (acetate pressing 12 March 1980; not actual release date)); also promo (a: "The Night" (remix) // b: "The Night" (remix))
Also released on "Toy Box" 4-CD set (2023).
"New Toy"
7"
a: "New Toy"
b: "Cats Away" (single mix)
Wrong speed for "Cats Away" on German 7" release, due to pressing error. The record itself plays at 45 rpm, but the speed of the b-side track is like playing a 33 rpm record at 45 rpm.
cassette
a: "New Toy" / "Cats Away" (single mix)
b: "New Toy" (Extended Version) / "Cats Away" (single mix)
12"
a: "New Toy" (Extended Version)
b: "Cats Away" (single mix)
a: "New Toy" (Extended Version)
b: "Cats Away" (single mix)
12" (EP) (Japan)
1: "New Toy" / "Lucky Number" (extended version ("Disco Version")) / "Bird Song" (edited intro)
2: "Cats Away" (single mix) / "Joan" / "Details" (first version)
Listed separately because this is the only vinyl release of "Details" (first version) in good audio quality. "Details" (first version) has been previously released on the "Riding High" soundtrack album (see "Other recordings" page) in low-standard audio quality.
See also upcoming screen/soundtracks/acting overview for "Details" (first version - instrumental), and upcoming detailed overview of all songs.
"Lucky Number" (extended version) (as released in 1979) called "Disco Version" on this release.
This EP (released in spring 1981) and two other 12" EPs also called "New Toy" (see below) are often incorrectly regarded as variations of the actual "New Toy" EP (see albums discography), to which they are in fact NOT related.
Those three EPs were released by local record labels without input from Lene or Stiff Records, while the actual "New Toy" EP (Epic Records, US, July 1981; also released in Canada and Australia) was an official new release which appeared for completely different reasons than these three others, and separate from the "New Toy" single release (see No Man's Land Rumours and Mysteries page).
-The Japanese "New Toy" six-track 12" EP (see above) is not a variation of the actual "New Toy" EP, but a different format of the "New Toy" single release. It was issued by the local record label instead of releasing "New Toy" in usual 7" / 12" single format.
At the time of its release (spring 1981) there had been no plans yet for the actual "New Toy" EP on Epic Records in America (July 1981).
-The Australian limited "New Toy" six-track 12" EP (see below) is not a variation of the actual "New Toy" EP, but a different format of the "New Toy" single release.
At the time of its release (spring 1981) there had been no plans yet for the actual "New Toy" EP on Epic Records in America (July 1981), which was also released in Australia later in the same year.
-The French "New Toy" five-track compilation 12" EP (see "Other releases" section) was released by the local record label in France in late 1982 or 1983, and is also unrelated to the actual "New Toy" EP.
Also, these three releases are not related to one another.
"Cats Away" (single mix) different to later released "New Toy" EP mix; see albums discography.
UK (13 February 1981); 7" / cassette (February 1981) (limited) / 12" (March 1981); 7" also promo (around early February 1981)
Australia (April 1981); 7" / 12" (EP; limited; 1: "New Toy" (Extended Version) / "Cats Away" (single mix) // 2: "Monkey Talk" (live) / "The Night" (live) / "Too Tender (To Touch)" (live) / "You Can't Kill Me" (live) (live recordings from "What Will I Do Without You" double 7"; see above))
Belgium; 7" / 12"
France; 7" / 12" (limited)
Germany; 7" (see above about wrong speed for b-side track) / 12"; 7" also promo
Italy; 7"
Japan (late March or April 1981); 12" (EP) (see above)
Mexico; 12"
Netherlands (14 March 1981); 7"
New Zealand; 7"
Spain; 7"; also promo
US; 12" (promo; a: "New Toy" (Extended Version) // b: "New Toy" (not listed on sleeve) / "Cats Away" (single mix)) (see also "Formerly planned releases" section) / 12" (promo; a: "New Toy" (Extended Version) // b: "New Toy")
Yugoslavia; 7"
"New Toy" (Extended Version), "Details" (first version), "Bird Song" (edited intro): Also released on "Toy Box" 4-CD set (2023).
________________________________________________________________________________________________
"Blue Hotel" (single recording)
"Blue Hotel" (single recording)
Different song than earlier written and recorded - but later released - same-titled song from "No Man's Land".
7" (Italy)
a: "Blue Hotel"
b: "Details" (re-recording) (as previously released on "New Toy" EP; see albums discography)
a: "Blue Hotel"
b: "O Seasons O Castles" (complete)
"O Seasons O Castles" recorded around early 1982.
German single listed separately because it is one of two releases on which "O Seasons O Castles" was originally available in its complete form (see also entry for "Maria").
(Mix for French TV film "Rock" on all CD releases except "Toy Box" (see below). Differences to mix from vinyl singles: about 20 seconds shorter and one vocal sound by Lene omitted.)
Italy (January or February 1982)
Germany ((? around May) 1983); blue vinyl; also promo (blue vinyl)
"Blue Hotel" (single recording): Also released on "Hotel Blue" compilation album (vinyl) (Italy (1982)) and various CDs.
"O Seasons O Castles" (complete): Also released on "Toy Box" 4-CD set (2023).
________________________________________________________________________________________________
"It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)"
12" (US, Canada)
a: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Extended Dance Mix)
b: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Version)
"It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)"
12" (US, Canada)
a: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Extended Dance Mix)
b: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Version)
7"
a: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (single mix)
b: "Blue"
12" (UK)
a: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Remixed Extended 12" Version)
b: "Blue" / "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Version) (not listed on label or sleeve)
12" (Mexico)
a: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Remixed Extended 12" Version (about 27 seconds longer than on UK release))
b: "Blue" / "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Version) (not listed on label or sleeve)
a: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Remixed Extended 12" Version)
b: "Blue" / "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Version) (not listed on label or sleeve)
12" (Mexico)
a: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Remixed Extended 12" Version (about 27 seconds longer than on UK release))
b: "Blue" / "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Version) (not listed on label or sleeve)
Single mix: Different to album mix.
Extended Dance Mix, Version: Mixed by Bob Clearmountain, Dick Wingate, Jane Brinton.
Remixed Extended 12" Version: Mixed by Lene Lovich, Les Chappell.
Version: Instrumental version with some vocals.
US (20 October 1982); 12" / 7" (January 1983); 7" also promo (a: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (single mix) // b: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (single mix))
UK (22 October 1982); 7" (with limited picture disc edition (29 October 1982)) / 12"; 7" also promo
Australia (January 1983); 7" (limited)
Belgium; 7"
Canada (1982); 12" / 7" (1983)
Germany; 7"; also promo
Japan (1983); 7" (b: "Faces"); also promo
Mexico (1983); 12" (see above for difference to UK release)
Netherlands (22 December 1982); 7"
Portugal (1983); 7"
Scandinavia (November 1982); 7"
South Africa; 7"
Spain; 7"; also promo
"It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (single mix): Also released on "Flex... plus" album (CD) (US (1991)).
"It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Extended Dance Mix), (Version), (Remixed Extended Version): Also released on "Toy Box" 4-CD set (2023).
"Blue Hotel" (from "No Man's Land")
Different song than later written and recorded - but earlier released - same-titled single recording (see above).
12"
a: "Blue Hotel" (Dance Mix)
b: "Blue Hotel"
12"
a: "Blue Hotel" (Dance Mix)
b: "Blue Hotel"
7"
a: "Blue Hotel"
b: "Savages" (album version)
"Blue Hotel" (Dance Mix): Mixed by Jane Brinton, John Morales, Sergio Muntibai on 02 March 1983.
US (March 1983); 12" / 7" (April 1983); 12" also promo / 7" also promo (a: "Blue Hotel" // b: "Blue Hotel")
"Blue Hotel" (Dance Mix): Also released on "Toy Box" 4-CD set (2023).
________________________________________________________________________________________________
"Maria"
7" (Australia)
a: "Maria"
b: "O Seasons O Castles" (complete)
"Maria"
7" (Australia)
a: "Maria"
b: "O Seasons O Castles" (complete)
Initially planned for UK release (see "Formerly planned releases" section).
"O Seasons O Castles" recorded around early 1982.
Listed separately because the Australian release is one of two releases on which "O Seasons O Castles" was originally available in its complete form (see also entry for "Blue Hotel" (single recording)).
(Mix for French TV film "Rock" on all CD releases except "Toy Box" (see below). Differences to mix from vinyl singles: about 20 seconds shorter and one vocal sound by Lene omitted.)
Italy (around May 1983); 7" (b: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)") / 12" (promo; a: "Maria" // b: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)"); 7" also promo
Spain (May 1983); 7" (b: "Savages" (album version)); also promo
"O Seasons O Castles" (complete): Also released on "Toy Box" 4-CD set (2023).
________________________________________________________________________________________________
"Don't Kill the Animals" (single re-recording) [Lene Lovich / Nina Hagen]
7"
a: "Don't Kill the Animals"
b: "Don't Kill the Animals" (Instrumental - single edit)
12"
a: "Don't Kill the Animals" (Disco Version)
b: "Don't Kill the Animals" (Instrumental) / "Don't Kill the Animals"
Disco Version: Extended version.
7"
a: "Don't Kill the Animals"
b: "Don't Kill the Animals" (Instrumental - single edit)
12"
a: "Don't Kill the Animals" (Disco Version)
b: "Don't Kill the Animals" (Instrumental) / "Don't Kill the Animals"
Disco Version: Extended version.
Instrumental, Instrumental - single edit: Instrumental version with some vocals.
Released prior to original recording (called Rescue Version; see "Other recordings" page).
Germany (autumn 1986); 7" / 12"
Germany (autumn 1986); 7" / 12"
France; 7" / 12"
South Africa; 7" / 12"
Spain; 7" / 12"
UK (06 January 1987); 7" / 12"
________________________________________________________________________________________________
"Wonderland" (single re-recording)
12"
a: "Wonderland" (New York Dance Mix) / "Wonderland" (New York Dance Mix - radio edit)
b: "Wonderland" (London Dance Mix) / "Wonderland" (London Dance Mix - radio edit)
cassette
a: "Wonderland" (New York Dance Mix - radio edit) / "Wonderland" (New York Dance Mix)
b: "Wonderland" (London Dance Mix - radio edit) / "Wonderland" (London Dance Mix)
CD
"Wonderland" (New York Dance Mix) / "Wonderland" (New York Dance Mix - radio edit) / "Wonderland" (London Dance Mix) / "Wonderland" (London Dance Mix - radio edit)
New York Dance Mix, New York Dance Mix - radio edit: Additional production and remix by Yvonne Turner, Goh Hotoda. Programmed by Alan Friedman.
London Dance Mix, London Dance Mix - radio edit: Remix by Lene Lovich, Les Chappell. Additional bass by Mark White.
New York Dance Mix - radio edit contains additional vocal elements.
Recorded in 1988 or early 1989; released prior to earlier recorded album version (see albums discography).
See also "Other recordings" page for further remixes.
US (around summer 1989); 12" / cassette (limited)
Australia; 12"
Canada; 12"
Germany; CD
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"Make Believe" (single mix)
7"
a: "Make Believe"
b: "Shadow Walk"
Transposed verses compared to album version (see albums discography).
Australia (April 1990); limited; also promo
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"Shapeshifter" [Lene Lovich / Comical Brothers]
Fragmentary versions of track from "Shadows and Dust" album, prior to its release (see albums discography).
CD
"Shapeshifter" (Comicals Mix) / "Shapeshifter" (I Could Be You Mix) / "Shapeshifter" (Subsonic Legacy Mix)
"Shapeshifter" (Comicals Mix) / "Shapeshifter" (I Could Be You Mix) / "Shapeshifter" (Subsonic Legacy Mix)
Based around loop by Comical Brothers (see upcoming detailed overview of all songs).
Track 1 mixed by Comical Brothers. Track 2 mixed by Lene Lovich and Les Chappell. Track 3 mixed by Subsonic Legacy (no input from original artists).
Track 1 mixed by Comical Brothers. Track 2 mixed by Lene Lovich and Les Chappell. Track 3 mixed by Subsonic Legacy (no input from original artists).
(12 December 1999; from UK)
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"The Wicked Witch" [Latz / Lene Lovich]
10" (EP)
a: "The Wicked Witch" (Monitor Mix) / (Latz: "Survive the Machines" (The Wicked Mix))
b: "Home" / (Latz: "Towers")
"The Wicked Witch", "Home" - vocals and "additional construction" by Lene Lovich, Les Chappell
10" (EP)
a: "The Wicked Witch" (Monitor Mix) / (Latz: "Survive the Machines" (The Wicked Mix))
b: "Home" / (Latz: "Towers")
"The Wicked Witch", "Home" - vocals and "additional construction" by Lene Lovich, Les Chappell
"The Wicked Witch": Song title by Latz (inspired from film "The Wizard of Oz", 1939); lyrics by Lene Lovich.
"The Wicked Witch" (Monitor Mix) previously available on "Dracfest tape" (September 1997; see "Other recordings" page).
"The Wicked Witch" recorded and mixed by Lene Lovich and Les Chappell) in 1994. "Home" recorded in 1995 and mixed in late 1996.
See also "Other recordings'' page for "The Wicked Witch" (album mix) and upcoming detailed overview of all songs.
(01 April 2000; from Germany); limited (523 copies); clear vinyl
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"Savages" [Lene Lovich Band]
Recorded some years before release.
Recorded some years before release.
Also released on "Wild at Heart: Locked in the Dressing Room" sampler album (vinyl) (early 2021) (see "Other recordings" page).
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Formerly planned releases:
"Home" (original mix, as released on "Stateless" (first release))
7"
a: "Home"
b: "Writing on the Wall" (original mix, as released on "Stateless" (first release))
Withdrawn.
"Home" (original mix, as released on "Stateless" (first release))
7"
a: "Home"
b: "Writing on the Wall" (original mix, as released on "Stateless" (first release))
Withdrawn.
UK (November 1978 (single-sided test pressing marked 11 September 1978, prior to album release))
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"The Night" (remix)
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"The Night" (remix)
As released on US single (see main section).
Intended for release by Stiff Records, but withdrawn because Lene opted for "What Will I Do Without You" (single version) instead.
UK (March 1980)
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"New Toy"
12"
a: "New Toy" (Extended Version)
b: "New Toy" / "Cats Away" (single mix)
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"New Toy"
12"
a: "New Toy" (Extended Version)
b: "New Toy" / "Cats Away" (single mix)
Withdrawn because Epic Records decided to release "New Toy" (EP) instead (see albums discography).
See also main section for US promo release.
US (March 1981)
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"Never Never Land"
"Never Never Land"
Intended for release by Lene, but Stiff Records boss Dave Robinson was not interested.
UK (1981)
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"Sister Video"
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"Sister Video"
Intended for release by Lene.
(1983)
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"Maria"
7"
a: "Maria"
b: "Savages" or "O Seasons O Castles" (complete)
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"Maria"
7"
a: "Maria"
b: "Savages" or "O Seasons O Castles" (complete)
Withdrawn.
See also main section for releases in Australia, Italy, Spain.
For "O Seasons O Castles" (complete), see also entries for "Blue Hotel" (single recording) and "Maria" at main section.
UK (06 May 1983)
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"Walk Like an Egyptian"
"Walk Like an Egyptian"
See upcoming detailed overview of all songs.
(1985)
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"Hold on to Love"
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"Hold on to Love"
One source claims this release was intended to be a remix. However, this is unconfirmed; perhaps it was just a single edit of the album recording.
Withdrawn.
Withdrawn.
Australia (October or November 1990)
See also "Other releases" section for "Hold on to Love" (as released on "March").
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Other releases:
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Other releases:
12" (album length) (promo)
"Lene Lovich speaks" (interview)
UK (1979)
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Single edit of remix from "Stateless" (third release).
7"
a: "Home"
b: "Writing on the Wall" (remix, as released on "Stateless" (second and third releases))
US (August 1979); also promo (a: "Home" (single edit) // b: "Home" (single edit))
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"Writing on the Wall"
Remix, as released on "Stateless" (second and third releases).
acetate 7"
single-sided
US (1979)
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12" (album length) (promo)
"Interview"
Canada (1980)
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7" (flexi-disc) (promo)
"What Will I Do Without You" (album version) (extract) / "Bird Song" (extract) / "The Night" (album version) (extract)
Track 1 segues into track 2; track 2 segues into track 3.
US (1980)
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"What Will I Do Without You" (album version)
12" (promo)
a: "What Will I Do Without You"
b: "Angels" / "The Night" (album version)
US (1980)
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"Lucky Number"
7" (promo)
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "What Will I Do Without You" (album version)
Canada (1980)
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"What Will I Do Without You" (album version) / "Lucky Number"
7"
a: "What Will I Do Without You"
b: "Lucky Number"
a: "What Will I Do Without You"
b: "Lucky Number"
Yugoslavia ((? April) 1980)
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"Lucky Number" / "Blue Hotel"
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"Hold on to Love"
7"
a: "Hold on to Love"
b: "Natural Beauty"
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"1980 Global Assault"
10" (EP) (promo)
a: "Monkey Talk" (live) / "The Night" (live) / "Too Tender (To Touch)" (live)
b: "Angels" (live) / "Lucky Number" (live) / "Home" (live)
a: Live at the Lyceum/London, 03 February 1980 (as released on "What Will I Do Without You" single). Produced and mixed by Bazza.
b: Live at Paradise Theater/Boston, 15 March 1980. Mixed by Barry Taylor, Dick Wingate.
US (1980)
b: Also released on "Toy Box" 4-CD set (2023).
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"Lucky Number"
7"
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "New Toy"
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "New Toy"
Released when "Lucky Number" was used on TV commercial for KP Nuts.
UK (21 May 1982); also promo
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"New Toy"
12" (EP)
a: "New Toy" / "Lucky Number" / "Say When"
b: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" / "Bird Song"
"New Toy"
12" (EP)
a: "New Toy" / "Lucky Number" / "Say When"
b: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" / "Bird Song"
See note at entry for "New Toy" at main section.
France (late 1982 or 1983)
France (late 1982 or 1983)
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"Lucky Number" / "Blue Hotel"
7"
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "Blue Hotel" (from "No Man's Land")
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "Blue Hotel" (from "No Man's Land")
Spain (1984)
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"Lucky Number" / "Bird Song"
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"Lucky Number" / "Bird Song"
7"
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "Bird Song"
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "Bird Song"
Philippines (1984)
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"Lucky Number" (extended version (not mentioned on disc or sleeve))
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"Lucky Number" (extended version (not mentioned on disc or sleeve))
As released in 1979 (see main section).
12"
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "New Toy"
12"
a: "Lucky Number"
b: "New Toy"
Released as part of CBS Special Products series.
US (early 1988)
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"Blue Hotel" (Dance Mix) / "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Extended Dance Mix)
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"Blue Hotel" (Dance Mix) / "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Extended Dance Mix)
"Blue Hotel" (Dance Mix) as released in 1983; "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)" (Extended Dance Mix) as released in 1982 (see main section).
12"
a: "Blue Hotel"
b: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)"
12"
a: "Blue Hotel"
b: "It's You, Only You (Mein Schmerz)"
Released as part of Mixed Masters series.
US (February 1988)
US (February 1988)
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"Hold on to Love"
7"
a: "Hold on to Love"
b: "Natural Beauty"
cassette
a: "Hold on to Love" / "Natural Beauty"
b: "Hold on to Love" / "Natural Beauty"
See also "Formerly planned releases" section.
Australia (October 1990 or 12 November 1990); cassette limited; 7" also promo
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